A Lesser Evil (16 page)

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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 harassed, 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 glass 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 crêpe de Chine blouse, and her face was flushed pink from the sun.

‘
Très 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 breasts, 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 assuring 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 sluttish 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 sexual 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 sex 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 pass, 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 sex 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 bitch in God’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, passed 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 bombshell, 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.

Everyone suspected the Muckles. Who else but them would see June leave the house and know there was no one else about? But this was confirmed as far as Frank was concerned when June showed him that his Post Office savings book had been taken out of the drawer in their bedroom and left on the chest of drawers. He knew that was Molly’s way of telling him that she knew how much money he’d got and she intended to go ahead with her threat unless he paid up.

Nothing could be proved. The police searched the Muckles’ house and found nothing. Frank had to pay Molly, and it wasn’t long after that June became ill. They found she had cancer while performing a hysterectomy.

In the two years before June finally died, Molly slowly bled their savings dry, yet he had to keep her silence. He couldn’t bear the thought of June passing away knowing he’d been unfaithful.

He had to give up his job to nurse June towards the end. Too old now to apply for an assisted passage to Australia, and with no money left to pay his fare, through that evil bitch of a woman he’d never see his daughter and grand-children again. He hated Molly Muckle so much he would happily kill her and her brats, and never mind if he had to swing for it.