A Lesser Evil (12 page)

Fifi didn’t like the look of Wally at all. He had a beer gut spilled over his trousers, and food stains down his shirt. Although he was only about thirty, she thought she wouldn’t be surprised to find he was a flasher himself.

But he claimed Alfie was in the habit of climbing along the wall at the backs of the houses, looking into lighted rooms. He warned her she should keep her curtains closed at night.

Despite the rather tedious repetitions about the Muckles, the warmth of the welcome from their new neighbours went a long way to reassure Fifi that Kennington wasn’t such a bad place to live. By the time they got home after the pub had shut, with a bag of chips each, she was feeling much happier and a little drunk.

‘It’s beginning to grow on me,’ she said as she sat down and looked about the living room. With just the light from the table lamps and all their things in place, it looked quite homely.

‘Even with the monsters across the road?’ Dan asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘Or is that part of the attraction?’

Fifi giggled. Dan was always teasing her about her curiosity. ‘They sound much too awful even for me,’ she said. ‘That woman with the black hair who said she lived next to the coal yard said their house is absolutely filthy. She said none of the children were ever toilet trained, and they’d just do it on the floor. She claimed the council has been round to fumigate the place loads of times. She said they have terrible fights in there, and there’s always dodgy people coming and going.’

‘Don’t take it too seriously,’ Dan said evenly. ‘People do get a bit vindictive about anyone different from themselves.’

Fifi knew he was right about that. Her own parents had proved it by being so nasty about Dan.

‘Perhaps I’ll put them under close observation,’ she joked. ‘I could make a study of them. Log what they do and at what time. If they really are responsible for all the crime around here, it could be useful to the police.’

‘Then you’d better have a chat with the French dressmaker,’ Dan said with a wide grin.

He had been far more intrigued to hear about the woman from Paris who sat sewing by her window all day than by the more salacious stories about her next-door neighbours. Apparently she only went out to give fittings for her wealthy clients, but it was generally supposed she knew everything that happened in the street. ‘She might do some shifts for you. Or maybe I should study her!’

‘We could call ourselves “Super Snoops”,’ Fifi giggled. ‘For a slogan we could have “Nothing gets past us”.’

Dan laughed. He was so relieved Fifi seemed happier now. For a minute or two this afternoon he’d thought she was going to take the next train back to Bristol.

He loved her to pieces, just to look at her lovely face made his heart melt, and he still couldn’t quite believe that a girl like her could love him. But there were times when she was like a spoiled child, expecting life to be one long picnic in the sun. He’d got her well away from her parents’ influence at last, and though it would probably be another nail in his coffin that he’d brought her to live here, Fifi needed a dose of reality.

Chapter Five

Fifi bounced along the street. She was happy because it was Saturday, a lovely sunny day, and once she’d got the shopping she and Dan were going out for a picnic in Hyde Park. As she reached Mrs Jarvis’s house at the end of the street, on an impulse she knocked on her door.

‘Hello,’ she said as the old lady answered. ‘I’m going down to Victor Values, is there anything I can get for you while I’m there?’

‘Is that the new-fangled place where you have to serve yourself?’

Fifi smiled. Although Alice Jarvis was over eighty and very frail, she didn’t miss much that was going on. Fifi had spoken to her for the first time a few days after they moved into Dale Street, a month ago now, and had been invited in for a cup of tea. The old lady lived in a Victorian time warp, still with the same heavy, highly polished or over-stuffed furniture her parents had brought with them when they moved in when she was a girl. She had four siblings, but she’d never left home as they did; when she married Mr Jarvis, he moved in with her and her parents.

Mrs Jarvis’s one and only concession to modern times was the electric lighting, which she’d reluctantly agreed to have put in after the war, a short while after her husband died. Her home reflected the lives and personalities of all those who had lived there: a lace-trimmed tablecloth made by her mother, a grandfather clock that had been her father’s pride and joy, dozens of framed sepia photographs of her brothers and sisters, and the piano in the parlour which they’d all played and sung around.

‘Yes, you do serve yourself,’ Fifi replied. ‘But it’s ever so much cheaper than the grocer’s.’

‘It sounds American to me.’ Mrs Jarvis sniffed with disapproval. ‘I don’t hold with anything from there. And I like someone to serve me.’

‘I’d rather save money,’ Fifi said with a smile. ‘And if I’m going for you, you’re not going to miss being served personally.’

Mrs Jarvis wavered. She looked very stern in her old-fashioned black dress and thick stockings, with her white hair tied up tightly in a bun, but Fifi had discovered she was a warm and friendly person. ‘Well, I could do with a quarter of tea and a packet of chocolate biscuits, if it’s not too much trouble,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my niece and her husband coming tomorrow afternoon. They usually take me out to tea somewhere, but it’s so nice out in the garden now, they might want to stay here.’

Fifi had a feeling Mrs Jarvis lived on little else but tea and biscuits; she hadn’t seen any sign of food in her kitchen when she was in there last week. But she didn’t know her well enough to start cross-examining her yet.

‘Have you finished your painting?’ Mrs Jarvis asked. The last time she had seen Fifi she’d remarked on the paint in her hair.

‘Yes, it looks lovely,’ Fifi said eagerly. ‘The living room is pale green and the bedroom cream. We’ve bought a new carpet too. Miss Diamond thinks it very tasteful.’

‘I hope she’s kind to you?’ Mrs Jarvis said anxiously. ‘She can be very fierce.’

Fifi grinned. Miss Diamond in the rooms downstairs to her was a supervisor at the telephone exchange and quite formidable, laying down the law about everything. ‘I can give as good as I get,’ she said. ‘She’s got a good heart really. I’d rather have her living downstairs than certain people in this road.’

‘Did you hear them last night?’ Mrs Jarvis said, raising her hands in an expression of horror and alarm. ‘Shouting and bawling, and the language!’

She was of course speaking about the Muckles. Hardly a night passed without something going on there. If it wasn’t a fight between Molly and Alfie, children screaming or music blaring out, it was the Friday night cards party when seedy-looking men left in the small hours, banging car doors and honking horns.

Last Friday, Dan had wanted to go over there because one of the women was screaming as if she was being viciously beaten. But fortunately it stopped suddenly and Dan let it go.

‘We thought everyone was exaggerating about them when we first moved in,’ Fifi replied. ‘I don’t really believe that the police can’t do anything about them. Surely they could charge them with disturbing the peace, if nothing else?’

‘They say Alfie bribes the police to turn a blind eye,’ Mrs Jarvis said conspiratorially. ‘I wish I could bribe someone to burn that house down and them with it. Mr Jarvis went over there once to try and stop their noise and soon after he was attacked coming home one evening. We couldn’t prove it was them, but everyone knew it was. They broke his jaw and his ribs – they are worse than animals.’

Although Fifi and Dan had found the stories about the Muckles a bit far-fetched when they first moved in, there was no doubt that some of the neighbours really were terrified of them. Mrs Jarvis’s lips quivered and her voice shook as she spoke of them, and she always looked out of her window before opening her front door. Fifi thought it was awful that an old lady who had lived here for almost her entire life should spend her last years in such fear.

Fifi wasn’t afraid of the Muckles, but she found watching them completely addictive. She knew she really shouldn’t find them so fascinating, they were after all the absolute dregs of the earth. But they were a novelty, so far removed from the quiet gentility of the neighbours she’d grown up observing that she almost liked them for giving her so much entertainment.

Dan had bought a second-hand television, but Fifi watched the Muckles more often. It was like having a theatre on her doorstep, the family acting out a long-running serial. There was comedy when Dora, the backward sister-in-law, ran down the street wearing nothing but men’s boots and a towel around her. She was running after Mike, the nephew, screaming that she loved him.

The serial had suspense when Molly and Alfie came home drunk; would it turn to a fight? Or would the night be filled with the sound of animalistic lovemaking later on? There was mystery when men arrived to play cards on a Friday night. Mainly they were as seedy-looking as Alfie, but some were smartly dressed, almost like businessmen, and Fifi was baffled as to why such men would want to play cards in such a grim place. Dan said that owning a handmade suit was in fact a hallmark of a villain, and however affluent these men appeared, they probably came from homes as rough as Alfie’s. She was puzzled too that the police never seemed to act after complaints of noise and disturbance. Then there was tragedy as well, as the poor children all looked so neglected.

Where did Molly go when she went out in the evening, alone and dressed to kill? Why was it that the children took a pram full of washing to the council laundry every week, yet not one of the family other than Molly ever wore anything clean? Where did they get the money to buy all those boxes of drink they carried home, when no one in the family appeared to work?

Yet most intriguing of all was that the Muckles had so many visitors. Hardly a day went by without Fifi seeing someone new go in there. Maybe the couple of teenage girls she’d seen were the two older daughters who no longer lived at home, but she didn’t think all the callers could be family members. No one in the street had anything good to say about Alfie, so how come he had so many friends?

She wondered about the Muckles all the time. She would give anything to be able to turn herself into a fly and go into that house to take a look around. She knew it would be filthy, she was sure they lived on nothing but fish and chips, but however much everyone kept telling her how dangerous they were, she couldn’t really believe that. To her they were all idiots, often brutal, always coarse, but hardly dangerous.

After a little chat with Mrs Jarvis, Fifi went on to the shop. To her surprise she had come to like Kennington. It might not be what she was used to, but it had a kind of buzz about it, as though there were a million and one things going on right under her nose.

She even liked the flat now they’d done it up. It might have been very different if they’d had awful people downstairs, but no one could mind sharing a bathroom with either Miss Diamond or Frank Ubley. Dan laughingly called Miss Diamond the bathroom monitor, because on their second day she’d personally instructed Dan on cleaning the bath after he’d used it. She put plants on the windowsill, she went in for various things that made it smell nice, and she washed over the floor twice a week.

As for Frank on the ground floor, he was a gem, as keen as Miss Diamond about cleanliness, but also kind and very helpful. He had lent Dan tools and helped him put up some shelves. He advised them about the best places to get paint or timber cheaper, and he showed his pleasure in having younger people in the house by being delighted when they asked him up for a cup of tea and to inspect what they’d been doing to their flat.

It felt so safe living above such nice, decent people, and the low rent meant they didn’t have to worry about money.

Yet it was the other neighbours who had really changed Fifi’s mind about Dale Street, for they were all so fascinating. Back in Kingsdown in Bristol, none of the other tenants had ever spoken to Dan or Fifi. In her parents’ street the neighbours had always seemed to lead such narrow lives, and though they were pleasant, they couldn’t talk about any subject other than their homes, children and gardens. She hadn’t thought anything of it when she was there, but now, after living here for a month, she realized that they were all afraid ever to let their real feelings show.

People around here didn’t have that problem. If something good had happened to them, they wanted the world to know. They’d drag you in to show you their new television or three-piece suite, or a new baby. They aired their disapproval as well. Fifi had heard people ranting about their unscrupulous landlords, hated in-laws, and even children who had disappointed them. They liked to laugh at themselves too. Back at home no housewife would admit she’d made a cake and forgot the sugar in it, or burned her husband’s dinner because she was chatting over the fence. But they did here, seeing no shame in showing they were flawed.

Fifi really liked that. It was real, it was good. She had always believed that the only way you could make real friends was if there was mutual opening up, seeing the differences in people and liking them for it.

Yvette the French dressmaker and Stan the Pole had come here in 1947 as refugees. Ivy Helass had been a dancer before she married Cecil, and it was said that John Bolton had robbed a bank and gone to prison for it. Fifi wanted to get to know everyone in the street, to hear their stories and make friends with them. But sadly, now she was working, she didn’t get much opportunity.

She had been taken on by a firm of solicitors in Chancery Lane during her first week in London. She liked the work as it was more varied than back in Bristol. Sometimes, if there was no junior available to deliver documents to one of the barristers in their chambers at the Temple, or the law courts, she took them. Aside from this breaking up the day and providing a chance to be out in the fresh air, she found the Temple appealing because it was so ancient.

It was exciting living in London. Everything seemed to go at twice the speed of Bristol. Rush hour had been terrifying at first; she couldn’t bring herself to elbow her way on to buses and the tube the way everyone else did. But she learned to, and now she could run after a bus and jump on the back as it was moving, leap off at traffic lights, even cross the road dodging through cars. She loved the incredible mixture of people too. Businessmen in bowler hats with furled umbrellas, strap-hanging on the tube alongside manual workers. Young girls in market-style clothing, their hair in beehives and Cleopatra-style eye makeup, mingling with women who looked as if they’d stepped out of the pages of
Vogue
.