A Lesser Evil (2 page)

‘Is the room really that bad?’ Fifi asked as they walked down to the pub.

‘Worse,’ he laughed. ‘The landlady is called Mrs Chambers. I wanted to ask if it was a Death Chamber, but she looked and sounded like Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend, and that threw me.’ He impersonated the woman’s voice, ‘No female visitors at any time. No callers or radios after ten. Clean sheets once a fortnight, all breakages must be replaced.’

Fifi giggled. ‘It sounds frightful!’

‘Not as bad as some places I’ve stayed in,’ he said with a shrug and that delicious impish grin which made Fifi’s toes curl up. ‘I stayed in a place in Birmingham once where they operated a shift system. As I got up, another bloke who worked nights came in and got in my bed.’

‘I don’t believe that.’ Fifi laughed. ‘You’re making it up!’

‘It’s true,’ he insisted. ‘We became really good mates in the end – he said I was the best bed-warmer he’d ever known.’

Fifi shuddered. ‘I couldn’t sleep in someone else’s sheets,’ she said.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever had to,’ he said, looking sideways at her appraisingly. ‘You look as if you’ve been brought up in the lap of luxury.’

The lap of luxury was perhaps an exaggeration, but Fifi was aware that her family’s standard of living was much higher than average. Their semi-detached house in Westbury-on-Trym, one of Bristol’s most pleasant suburbs, was large and comfortable, and as her father was a lecturer at Bristol University, that placed them firmly in the upper-middle classes. Although they were not rich by any means, there had always been month-long holidays in Devon, bicycles, dancing and tennis lessons. Fifi had gone to a private secretarial college after leaving school. But she’d never really thought of herself as particularly fortunate because almost all her friends came from similar backgrounds.

‘I don’t get on that well with my mother,’ she blurted out.

She didn’t really know why she told him that, true though it was. Maybe it was a way of distancing herself from her background. ‘I really ought to leave home and get a flat of my own.’

In the pub over a drink Fifi told Dan about her younger siblings, Patty, Robin and Peter, and that there were only fourteen to sixteen months between each of them. ‘They are all more like Mum and Dad,’ she explained. ‘They’re docile and obedient. I was a disappointment to Mum from the start because I was weird.’

‘You don’t look weird to me,’ Dan said. ‘Far from it.’

‘You wouldn’t say that if you could see the photos of me at five or six.’ Fifi giggled. ‘I was as thin as a rasher of bacon, my hair was snow-white like an albino’s, and I had a huge mouth and bug eyes.’

To illustrate this she pulled at her eyes and lips to make herself grotesque, a trick she’d found always made people laugh.

‘So the good fairy came along, did she?’ Dan chuckled, sounding as if he didn’t believe her. ‘Or am I looking at you with magic eyes?’

‘What’s that?’ Fifi asked.

‘My one talent,’ he said. ‘I don’t ever let myself be disappointed. Looking at things with magic eyes makes me see how they could be when I’d rearranged them, painted, repaired or tweaked them. Take that room up the road. I imagined it with nice wallpaper and a rug on the floor, then it wasn’t so bad.’

Fifi thought that was a lovely idea. She wondered if she could apply it to her mother and see how she would be if her critical manner, her sarcasm and suspicion could be removed. ‘So do I need tweaking or rearranging?’

Dan shook his head. ‘No, you’re just perfect. I can’t really believe that on my first night in Bristol I’ve got such a pretty girl with me. Even if you did only come with me out of pity.’

It wasn’t pity Fifi felt for him, far from it. It wasn’t just that he was so handsome, it was the sparkle in his dark eyes, the fullness of his lips, the sheen on his skin, the lithe animal grace with which he moved. He made her giggle and her heart flutter. She couldn’t remember any man having this effect on her before, but then the kind of men she normally dated were usually smooth, besuited office workers.

‘Now, what makes you think I came out of pity?’ she said archly, raising her eyebrows.

‘So what was it then?’ he grinned.

‘Curiosity. I’m famous as a nosy parker. When I was a kid I used to embarrass my parents by asking total strangers the most personal questions.’

‘Go on then, ask me one,’ he dared her.

Fifi had a hundred questions she was dying to ask, but if she could only pick one it had to be something that would move things on to a more personal level.

‘Have you got a hairy chest?’ she asked.

He looked a bit stunned, but grinned and unbuttoned his shirt, just enough for her to see smooth, hairless skin, still retaining the remnants of a golden tan. ‘Any good?’ he asked.

‘Perfect,’ she laughed. ‘I can’t bear hairy men.’

‘Can I ask one now?’ he said.

‘As long as it doesn’t involve me unbuttoning my blouse.’

‘Would you kiss a man in his working clothes?’

Fifi spluttered with laughter. It was true she’d noticed his clothes were a little grubby, but it hadn’t put her off him one iota. In fact his checked flannelette shirt, worn jeans and donkey jacket suited him.

‘It would depend on the man,’ she said. She nodded towards a man standing up at the bar; he had a huge paunch hanging over paint-splattered trousers, and he was nearly bald. ‘I wouldn’t kiss him even if he was in a velvet smoking jacket. But you I might.’

It was after eleven when Fifi finally got home. Her mother came rushing out into the hall at the sound of the key in the door.

In the last two or three years people had begun remarking that Fifi was growing to look just like her mother. It was a compliment as Clara was a very pretty woman who looked much younger than her forty-four years. They were both tall, slender, blonde-haired and brown-eyed, with heart-shaped faces. But Fifi fervently hoped she would never inherit her mother’s nature, for she flared up at nothing and could say such nasty, spiteful things, which were mainly directed at Fifi.

‘Wherever have you been?’ Clara asked, her eyes narrowed with suspicion and irritation. ‘Carol’s been on the phone asking why you weren’t at Carwardines to meet her. I was really beginning to worry about you as it is such a cold night.’

‘I rang her office and left a message for her,’ Fifi lied. ‘I suppose no one told her.’

‘What was so sudden and important you had to let her down? Carol’s such a nice girl,’ Clara said tersely.

Fifi had her head so far up in the clouds after the evening with Dan that she hadn’t even considered thinking up a plausible story for when she got home. She certainly couldn’t tell the truth – her mother would have fifty fits if she thought she’d been picked up by a strange man.

‘It was Hugh,’ she said hastily, hanging up her coat on the hall stand. ‘He rang me this morning and seemed in a bit of a state. I felt I had to meet him.’

Hugh was an old boyfriend who lived in Bath. Fifi’s parents had liked him a great deal and probably hoped she’d marry him because he was doing his articles with a law firm and came from a very good family. They had split up just after Fifi’s twenty-first birthday, over a year ago, but had remained friends. So she didn’t think it was too terrible to use him as an alibi.

‘What was the matter with him?’

Clara always used this deeply suspicious tone with Fifi. Patty, Peter or Robin could get away with just about anything, but for some unfathomable reason Clara always seemed to think the worst of her eldest child.

‘Oh, just a girl who’s messing him around,’ Fifi said lightly. ‘We had a couple of drinks and some supper. He was more cheerful when I left him. I’ll phone Carol in the morning and explain; it’s too late now.’

‘You could have phoned me,’ her mother snapped.

Fifi sighed. ‘I didn’t know Carol hadn’t got the message. So why would I phone you? I wasn’t expected home.’

‘Most girls still living at home would let their mothers know where they were in case of an emergency. You treat this place like a hotel and your father and me as if we were caretakers.’

Fifi rolled her eyes at the same old line her mother trotted out with monotonous regularity. ‘Mum, I’m tired and cold. I’m sorry I didn’t phone you, that Carol didn’t get my message and for anything else I may have done to upset you. Now may I go to bed?’

Clara Brown turned and flounced back to the sitting room without so much as a goodnight. Fifi went straight upstairs, fervently hoping Patty was already asleep, as she didn’t fancy another interrogation.

Fifi had made Dan laugh that night telling him just how difficult she’d been as a child, and she had no doubt he thought she was exaggerating. But in fact she’d played the truth down. It wasn’t only that she was so strange-looking; she knew her parents had been seriously worried for a time that her peculiar behaviour was caused by a mental deficiency. She couldn’t sit still or concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes; she threw tantrums and could scream for hours. She either stared balefully at people in complete silence, or she was firing personal questions at them. She didn’t mix well with other children; she snatched their toys and pinched their arms or legs. She wouldn’t eat or sleep and she talked to herself.

It hadn’t helped that Patty, who was only fourteen months younger, was a cute, docile little poppet, with golden curls, plump pink cheeks and the kind of charm that made everyone want to pick her up and hug her.

Fifi could appreciate now how desperate her mother must have felt, particularly in the last year of the war, when she had three under-fives and her husband was away most of the time. Clara had been so worn out after Robin was born that they had to have a live-in nurse for a while. It was that nurse who had suggested that Fifi’s brain might have been damaged by the forceps during her delivery.

The nurse was wrong, of course. By the time Fifi was ten she could read and write as well as any child in her class, and her behaviour was vastly improved. While her mother claimed that she was still very difficult at home, elsewhere she behaved in a relatively normal fashion.

Fifi went out of her way to tell people what a horrible child she’d been. But then, she could look in the mirror and see no trace of the peculiar, bug-eyed, skinny kid she’d once been. At twelve she’d begun to fill out, her white hair finally darkened to honey-blonde, and all at once her eyes and mouth were not just in proportion, but her two best features. She still remembered so well the first time someone remarked that she was pretty – it was like finding a crock of gold. Now she got on well with almost everyone; people remarked how much fun she was, and on her caring, easygoing nature.

All except her mother, who still had plenty to complain about. According to her, Fifi was lazy, wilful, self-centred, undomesticated and completely oblivious to others’ feelings. Fifi felt her mother’s nastiness to her was just jealousy, because she’d never had the freedom or fun her daughter enjoyed.

Clara married Harry when she was twenty-one, just as war broke out. Harry had been teaching mathematics when they married, but he spent the war code-breaking, and was away from home for months on end. Fifi was convinced that the reason her mother sniped at her about her job, her clothes, and going dancing every weekend, was purely because when Clara was the same age, she’d been stuck at home alone with a baby.

Patty was fast asleep, but she’d left the little bedside light between their twin beds on. Fifi undressed quickly and got into bed, lying there for a moment remembering how when they were little they always slept together in one of the beds. The room still held so many childhood memorabilia. Cuddly toys and dolls still sat among their Enid Blyton books, a picture of a princess painted by Patty at seven or eight was still on the wall, and there were dozens of photos of them both. Patty kept pictures of her favourite film stars in a tottering heap of scrapbooks. Fifi had gone through a stage when she wanted to be a fashion designer, and the cards she made, with a sketch and samples of dress material pinned to them, were arranged on the wall by the window.

It was a big, comfortable room, with flowery curtains, pinstriped wallpaper and a long teak dressing table with triple mirrors. Patty’s side was neat and tidy, little china ballerinas carefully arranged alongside scent, hair lacquer and cosmetics. Fifi’s side was the complete opposite, littered with tubes and pots with the tops left off, pens, old letters, reels of cotton all mixed up with her makeup. Patty moaned about it, but she stoically removed dirty cups and plates almost daily, and when she dusted her side, she did Fifi’s too, just as she hung up her clothes and made her bed.

Dan had looked envious when Fifi told him about her brothers and sister. She had thought he was joking when he said he’d been abandoned as a baby in Swindon, but it turned out to be shockingly true. He’d spent his life in various children’s homes, and was kicked out at fifteen to fend for himself.

Fifi glanced across at Patty, lying on her side with one plump arm protectively around her head, and she smiled affectionately. She loved Patty; they were friends and allies, even if they were as different as chalk and cheese. Patty was placid and patient, while Fifi was fiery and impetuous.

Pretty little Patty had become fat, plain Patty with awful acne as she got into her teens, yet she was still so sweet-natured. She was training to be an optician, and she had the patience of a saint with old people.

Fifi wished she was patient too, but she always wanted everything immediately. She couldn’t bear to wait in queues; she ran across busy roads instead of waiting for the lights to go green. She spent her wages mentally before she even got paid. She jumped into situations with both feet without stopping to think.

She was doing it again now with Dan. She’d only known him for six hours, but she was already convinced they were made for each other.

Getting excited over a new man wasn’t a new experience; she’d done it many times before. She would hang round the phone willing it to ring, count the hours till they met, weave improbable fantasies about the life they’d have together. But these romances had always been shortlived.