A Lesser Evil (3 page)

She knew exactly why. It was because she always hid her real character behind a phoney one, trying to be whatever she believed the man wanted.

Hugh had wanted someone who would bolster up his self-image. Not too bright, not too stunning, a girl who would hang on his every word and be the perfect accessory of a would-be lawyer, never complaining or demanding anything of him.

She’d been so good at it too, until she got bored with stroking his ego and kowtowing to him.

Alan, the boyfriend before Hugh, had wanted a wild, arty girl. Fifi had been quite good at that too, wearing tight black slacks and baggy jumpers and tying her hair back in a pony-tail. She learned lots of obscure poems, pretended she liked jazz and red wine, and talked about going to live in the Latin Quarter in Paris.

That had been fun for a while, but she missed pretty clothes, and got tired of pretending to be a Bohemian. There had been other characters she’d played too; it seemed preferable to be anyone other than her real self.

*

Tonight, however, she’d just been herself. That was partly because of the way she and Dan met, when she wasn’t dressed up. She had been in her work clothes, her hair needed a wash, there was a ladder in her stocking and she hadn’t even put on any perfume. She didn’t once try to impress Dan, nor did she build him up to be something he wasn’t either.

It was all the laughing that made it so easy to be natural. Dan was neither a clown nor a joke-teller; he was just a funny person with his witty turn of phrase, his razor-sharp observations and ability to see humour in just about everything.

After his question about whether she’d kiss a man in his work clothes they had gone on to a couple of other pubs, so he could get an idea of the area he’d be living in. She found out that he was twenty-five and had done his National Service in the Army; although he never went out of the country, he had enjoyed it so much that he was tempted to sign on as a regular.

In the past he’d had a spell living rough; he’d spent six months in a leaky caravan in the middle of a field, and stayed in many other grim lodgings when the building firm he worked for sent him off to a different town.

His friends were the men he worked with, and it seemed to Fifi, by the affectionate way he spoke of them, that they were the nearest thing he had to family. He hadn’t accumulated many personal belongings as he had never had a real base. But he said his boss would be bringing the rest of his stuff from Swindon tomorrow, a few more clothes, a radio and some tools.

‘What I’d really like is to settle down and have a real home,’ he said at one point, the only time in the whole evening when he sounded less than content with his lot. ‘I’d like to decorate it myself and have furniture I’d chosen. To lock the door and know no one could barge in on me.’

Fifi turned off the bedside light and snuggled down under the covers. She had been moved by the simplicity of what Dan wanted. Most men coveted a smart car or a hand-tailored suit; they wouldn’t care about a decent place to live. And she’d never known anything else. She took this warm and spacious four-bedroomed house, with its plethora of lovely antique furniture passed down from both her parents’ families, for granted. However much her mother might irritate her, she was always there with whatever any of them needed, be it a meal, an ironed dress or a mended zip. Cleaning, cooking, washing were all done as if by magic; there were homemade cakes in the cake tin, sandwiches ready every morning for their lunch. If one of them was ill, their mother fussed over them.

As children, their home was open to all their friends. Fifi’s father would erect tents for them in the garden, play cricket with them and hang ropes on the trees for them to swing on. Her mother never minded how many extra mouths she had to feed, and she would run up costumes for little shows they put on, hide Easter eggs in the garden, haul huge boxes back from the grocery shop for them to make into toys or houses. She was there bathing grazed knees, comforting them when they didn’t get school prizes, celebrating when they did, always loving and caring.

Dan hadn’t had any of that.

He didn’t invite sympathy; he was too amusing, too manly and confident. Yet all the same Fifi knew that her parents would take one look at him and disapprove. What they wanted for her was a man from a similar background, well bred, with a good family and excellent prospects. Fifi didn’t feel her father was a snob – he liked nothing better than getting students from working-class homes attending his lectures, and he made himself accessible to them to give them extra help. But neither he nor her mother would welcome a roaming bricklayer with a poor education for their daughter.

To be truthful, Fifi had always imagined herself marrying a man in one of the professions. She’d never been attracted to louts that hung around on street corners or stumbled drunkenly about dance halls. All her previous boyfriends had been friends of other friends; not one had been an unknown quantity. And she had been out with all of them in a group situation before she took the chance and met them alone. It was completely out of character for her to behave the way she had tonight. But it felt as if it was meant to be.

She knew Dan was special. He might not be educated, but he was clever, funny and strong. When he’d kissed her goodnight at the bus stop, she had almost cried because it was so heartstoppingly wonderful.

The few short hours she’d spent with him had been the most memorable and happy of her whole life. Just before they left the last pub, ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You’ sung by Elvis came on the jukebox. They’d kind of looked at each other and smiled, and Dan sang along with it in an amazingly good impersonation of Elvis, all the time looking right at her. She supposed that was pretty corny, but it had made her feel all fluttery inside.

Just remembering his kiss made her tingle too. No other man had ever stirred her that way or made her feel she could easily lose control. She and her friends often discussed whether they would go to bed with someone before they were married. Fifi had always been insistent that she wouldn’t. But tonight she’d experienced real desire, and she realized that those feeble little flutterings she’d felt in the past with boys were nothing compared with how Dan made her feel.

What was she going to do? If she told her parents about him, they’d ask her to bring him home. That might frighten him off. If she saw him in secret and her parents found out, they’d assume she had something to be ashamed of.

‘Wait and see how it turns out,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Maybe you won’t feel the same tomorrow.’

‘You look even more beautiful than I remembered,’ Dan said as they met by the Odeon the following night.

‘You look pretty handsome yourself,’ Fifi retorted. She had rushed home from work, wolfed down her tea and spent an hour getting ready, so she had half expected him to com-ment on how good she looked. But he was transformed, wearing a brown pinstriped Italian suit with a fashionable short jacket, white shirt and highly polished shoes. She hoped she might run into one of her friends so she could show him off. No one she knew had a boyfriend as gorgeous as Dan.

‘Are you sure you want to see this film?’ Dan asked, looking apprehensively at the poster for
A Taste of Honey
with Rita Tushingham.

‘My sister said it was brilliant,’ Fifi said. ‘She cried buckets.’

Dan grinned. ‘Is that what makes a film good for girls?’

‘I suppose so,’ Fifi agreed. ‘But we could go to another cinema if you like.’

‘No, it’s too cold to walk about.’ He looked down at her winkle-picker stilettos. ‘And I don’t think you’d get far in those anyway.’

*

The film was unbearably sad, and even though Fifi tried hard not to cry because she was afraid her mascara would run, she couldn’t help herself. As they came back out into the foyer, Dan pulled her over to one side, and using the handkerchief he’d had in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, he wiped her face clean.

‘That’s better,’ he said when he’d finished, kissing her on the nose. ‘You’re a bit of a surprise! I thought you were too sophisticated to cry.’

‘I felt so sorry for Jo; she was so plain and unloved,’ Fifi said. ‘And her mother was such an unfeeling cow.’

‘They all reminded me of people I’ve met,’ Dan said thoughtfully as they left the cinema. ‘It was a bit too much of real life for me.’

‘Is your room as bad as the one she lived in?’ Fifi asked as they walked into a pub in the city centre for a drink before she had to catch the bus home. The pub was crowded, with nowhere to sit, and she wished they had somewhere they could go to be alone.

‘It’s a lot smaller,’ Dan replied, waving a pound note at the barman. ‘But the kitchen could star in a kitchen-sink drama – it doesn’t look as if it’s been cleaned for months.’

‘You didn’t say you’d got a kitchen,’ Fifi said in surprise.

‘I have to share it with everyone else,’ he said. ‘I won’t make anything more than a cup of tea in there, I’d be afraid of catching something.’

Fifi had a Babycham and Dan a pint of bitter, and she began quizzing him anxiously about where he’d eat and do his washing.

‘There’s cafés and launderettes,’ he said airily. ‘I’m used to all that.’

On the bus ride home later, Fifi’s mind kept alternating between reliving Dan’s kisses and thinking of him going home to that horrible room. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in a daze over a man’s kisses, though she’d never met anyone who kissed quite as wonderfully as Dan. But it was the first time she’d ever been troubled by how someone had to live.

It was the combination of wanting to be with Dan all the time and worrying about him that confirmed she really had fallen head over heels in love with him. She could think of nothing but their next meeting. Her heart pounded when she saw him and just the touch of his hand made her feel she was on fire. But the thought of him washing and ironing his own shirts, having to work outside in the pouring rain and going home without anyone to make him a cup of tea moved her to tears.

Every day after work she would rush to meet him in the café near where he lived. She didn’t care that he was often caked with brick dust or cement, soaked through when it had been raining – she needed to see him. Just to sit with him over a cup of tea and talk for half an hour every day was better than having to wait two or three days for a proper date.

Dan felt the same way too. Sometimes he’d ring her from a call-box while she was at work, saying he just had to hear her voice. When she was with him she was floating on a cloud, but during the times they were apart she felt bereft. Keeping him a secret was so hard too, for she wanted to tell everyone about him, especially Patty, but she didn’t dare in case her sister let it slip to their parents.

Almost daily she told herself that she was twenty-two, old enough to go out with whoever she wanted to. She even mentally rehearsed telling the family over the evening meal. But every time she was about to break the news, her mother would say something sarcastic, or she was in a bad mood, and Fifi lost her nerve. The longer it went on, the worse it got as she had to tell lies about who she was going out with. She felt bad for Dan too, for he must surely guess why she hadn’t given him her home phone number, and why she didn’t invite him home or to meet any of her friends.

Yet Dan didn’t ever ask her about that. He cursed that he hadn’t got a car, because at least then they’d have somewhere warm and dry to be alone together. He couldn’t take her to where he lived, and that left only pubs or the cinema. But they didn’t want to drink or watch films, all they wanted was to talk, kiss and pet. The cold, wet weather lingered on, and they felt tormented that they had no privacy.

One Saturday morning, when Fifi had been going out with Dan for six weeks, she was doing some hand-washing at the kitchen sink. Her mother was sitting at the table cleaning the silver, talking about getting some new curtains for the boys’ bedroom, but Fifi wasn’t really listening; as usual, she was thinking about Dan.

‘I don’t know why you want to bother with new curtains,’ Fifi said when she realized Clara was expecting some input from her. ‘They’ll never notice.’

‘I suppose you think your father and I haven’t noticed you’ve got a new boyfriend, either,’ Clara retorted with a touch of acid. ‘When are you going to tell us about him?’

Fifi gulped, and carried on squeezing her cardigan in the suds. She had expected that her mother would put two and two together before long. She always did. But Fifi didn’t feel relieved that it could now be out in the open. She knew her mother would find fault.

‘His name is Dan Reynolds, he’s twenty-five, a bricklayer, and he comes from Swindon,’ she blurted out, still keeping her back to her mother.

‘I see. So what’s wrong with him that you couldn’t tell us that before?’

‘Nothing. I just didn’t want to rush anything,’ Fifi said, blushing when she thought of all those hours they’d spent in shop doorways and back alleys, kissing and caressing each other. At times she’d got so carried away that if Dan had taken her against the wall, or pushed her down on the ground, she didn’t think she would’ve objected.

‘And where does this bricklayer live? I assume you aren’t catching the train to Swindon to meet him?’

‘He lives in lodgings on the Gloucester Road.’ Fifi’s heart sank at the way her mother had said ‘bricklayer’.

Clara sniffed in disdain.

‘Don’t do that, Mum.’ Fifi whirled round from the sink. ‘Judging someone before you meet them.’

‘I’d say it was you who has already judged him, and that’s why you haven’t brought him home,’ Clara retorted.

‘I guessed you’d be like this,’ Fifi said indignantly. ‘You always make it so hard for me to tell you anything. I really like Dan; he’s the nicest man I’ve ever met. So please don’t spoil it for me.’

‘How can I spoil anything when I haven’t even caught a glimpse of him, let alone spoken to him? Really, Fifi, you are so peculiar sometimes!’

‘I’m not peculiar, it’s you being such a snob! You look down your nose at anyone that’s not in one of the professions. Well, Dan is a bricklayer, he’s an orphan too, brought up in a children’s home. But he’s a good man, he works hard, he doesn’t get drunk and beat people up, he’s not in trouble with the police, and I love him.’