A Lesser Evil (8 page)

By the time she came out of the bathroom, much more sober now, Dan was fast asleep in bed, but she was wide awake, very much aware it was the early hours of Christmas morning and for the first time in her life she wouldn’t be sitting down later to a family lunch.

She and Dan had bought a tree and put up decorations everywhere, and until then she’d thought the flat looked like an enchanted grotto. But as she sat huddled up on the couch wrapped in her dressing-gown, thinking about what Robin had said earlier, the twinkling lights, tinsel and paper streamers all looked so garish in comparison to the elegant decorations her parents went in for. There was only a handful of Christmas cards too, just from girls at work, and suddenly she felt an enormous sense of loss.

Christmas at home was always so jolly and noisy. Even when they’d all got too big to have stockings, they still crowded into their parents’ room quite early in the morning and insisted on opening the presents. Neighbours would pop in during the morning for a drink, and there would be a record of carols playing on the radiogram. Sometimes her maternal aunts, Rose and Lily, would come up from Somerset with their husbands and children; other times Uncle Ernest, her father’s brother, would come with his wife and two boys who were a similar age to Robin and Peter. After a huge dinner they’d play games, charades, Monopoly or Ludo.

This year there would be just her and Dan, no carols playing, no games. She had believed until now that she would be glad to be alone with Dan, that family gatherings were boring, yet all at once they seemed so dear and precious. She began to cry because she felt forlorn and cut off. If Robin was against her, that meant Peter probably was too, her father would always side with her mother, and that left only Patty. Her family had shrunk to one person who wouldn’t even be able to visit over the holiday.

‘Would you like an aspirin?’ Dan asked, looking concerned.

Fifi forced herself to smile. ‘No, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I got so legless last night, and Happy Christmas.’

‘Santa’s been,’ Dan said, pulling a bulky stocking out from under the bed. It was one of the white net ones, trimmed with red crêpe paper, that Fifi had often had as a child, and peeping from the top was a teddy bear in a red woolly hat.

‘Oh, Dan,’ she exclaimed, all at once aware he must have planned this weeks ago. ‘I didn’t think to make you one.’

‘I didn’t expect one,’ he said, sitting down beside her on the bed and pouring her some tea. ‘You are all I want for Christmas.’

‘I have got you presents,’ she said. ‘Just not the stocking. I intended to get up before you and put them all under the tree. They’re still in the sideboard where I hid them.’

‘Eat your breakfast, then we’ll open them,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. ‘Our first Christmas together, that’s very special.’

Fifi’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away and laughed, saying it was because he was so sweet, but the truth was that she felt ashamed of herself. She could have thought of making Dan a stocking. And she shouldn’t have spent half the night thinking about her old home and feeling sorry for herself.

Dan was taken on by a Bristol building firm the day after Boxing Day. He was ecstatic when he returned home, for the job was building a new rank of shops, and the site he would be working on was right in town. Just a walk from home, and better money than he’d been earning with Jack-son’s. He was due to start work on New Year’s Day.

On New Year’s Eve Fifi hurried home from work with two steaks and a bottle of Blue Nun. They had no plans to go anywhere special to see the New Year in, but some of the girls at work had said it was always like a big party up at the Victoria Rooms in Clifton. Apparently the previous year someone had put detergent in the fountains and the bubbles went right across the road. Fifi thought if Dan was agreeable they might walk over there to have a look.

Dan had the chips cooking and the table laid when she got in. He’d lit candles and he had Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion’ on the record-player. He took Fifi’s coat and hung it up, then grabbed the steaks and began grilling them, all the time singing and dancing to the music.

This was a new party piece, it was usually Elvis Presley he liked to do. He knew the words of all his songs, and he had Elvis’s voice, gyrating hips and mannerisms down to a T. Often he would get Fifi crying with laughter when he did ‘Teddy Bear’.

‘Come on, baby, do the Locomotion with me,’ he sang as he put the bread on the table and coming up behind her, made her turn her arms like pistons.

‘Where’s Elvis tonight?’ she asked laughingly as the record finished.

‘New year on its way in, new music,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to work on Cliff Richard, or Duane Eddy.’

‘Duane Eddy doesn’t sing,’ she giggled. ‘And you don’t look anything like Cliff.’

‘Then perhaps I’ll be Ray Charles,’ he said, and turning away, swiftly picked up two beer-bottle tops as impromptu sunglasses and burst into ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’.

‘Idiot,’ she said affectionately. ‘But let those steaks burn and I’ll stop loving you.’

‘I’m too full to go anywhere,’ Fifi said with a groan as she staggered away from the table an hour later. She lay down on the bed, undoing the waistband on her skirt.

Dan looked at her and laughed. ‘I thought you wanted to dance in the fountains!’

‘That was before steak, chips and mushrooms,’ she said. ‘Do you really want to go out?’

Dan went over to the window. ‘Well, I thought I did,’ he said, a note of surprise in his voice. ‘But it’s snowing!’

‘No!’ Fifi exclaimed. ‘You’re just saying that to make me get up.’

‘It is, and it’s heavy too,’ Dan insisted. ‘Come and see.’

Fifi got up reluctantly. ‘If you are having me on I’ll punish you,’ she said. But as she got to the window she gasped when she saw Dan was telling the truth.

There had never been any snow to speak of in Bristol, not since 1947. Fifi was seven then and she remembered going sledging day after day because the schools were closed, and building a huge snowman in the garden. Grown-ups harped on about that terrible winter for years after, but it had never been repeated. If snow did fall it was light and usually gone within a day or two.

‘Good God,’ she exclaimed as she watched it swirling against the window. ‘It’s like a blizzard.’

As they were on the second floor and it was dark, they couldn’t see if it was settling on the ground.

‘I won’t be able to lay bricks if it does settle,’ Dan said. ‘Let’s hope it’s cleared by morning.’

When they woke the following morning the light in the room was grey and sinister and there was no sound of traffic in the distance. Fifi got up, and to her astonishment a thick carpet of snow lay over the whole of Bristol.

Her initial reaction was delight, for everything looked so beautiful, like an old-fashioned Christmas card scene. She called excitedly to Dan to come and look.

Like her he was entranced, but he looked worried too. ‘I’ll go down to the site, but the chances are there’ll be no one there as I doubt if there’s any buses running. Damn, this would happen just as I was starting a new job.’

‘It won’t last,’ Fifi reassured him. ‘Shame I only have to walk to work, I’ve got no excuse for not being there. We could’ve gone to Redland Park and played in the snow.’

Bristol’s centre was virtually deserted. No buses were running and few people had even attempted to drive in as many roads into the city were impassable. Fifi was amused to see how the few very determined people who had braved the snow to get to their work were reacting. Bundled up in thick coats, boots, hats and scarves, they were acting like intrepid pioneers, yelling out warnings to others about areas they’d passed through that morning.

Fifi enjoyed her walk to the office, taking a childish delight in making footprints in clean snow. Everything looked so pretty; even waste ground that was normally an eyesore of rubbish and weeds had become a winter wonderland. But the sky was like lead and everyone was predicting there was more snow to come.

Only one of the solicitors and Miss Phipps, the accountant, had managed to get into the office, so at three in the afternoon as it began to get dark, they went home.

Dan was already there when Fifi got home, making a stew for their dinner. He looked glum and anxious as he told her that the foreman on the building site had told him there would be no work for the rest of the week, and unless the weather improved dramatically, he doubted there’d be any the week after either.

‘Never mind,’ Fifi said comfortingly. ‘We can manage on my money.’

‘I’m supposed to provide for you,’ he said grumpily. ‘It’s not a very good start to the new year.’

The bad weather continued for several weeks, with many more heavy snowfalls, and Dan’s spirits sank lower and lower when he couldn’t go to work. Fifi was very sympathetic at first because she knew it hurt his pride to live on her wages. But as time went on, and she had to battle her way through snow and ice daily while he was home in the warm flat, irritation began to set in.

She didn’t care that he wasn’t bringing any money in, she just missed him being jolly and fun. There were no more Elvis impersonations, he had nothing to talk about, and each night when she got home, he had a glum face. He did all the shopping, cleaned the flat and cooked the dinner, but that only seemed to emphasize her shortcomings because he was far better at cooking and cleaning than she was, and an expert at economical meals.

Whenever she suggested they went out for a change, he always pointed out how cold and miserable it was outside. He was right of course, but the real reason he didn’t want to go was because of the money. She ached to be in a noisy, lively pub, to see other people and have some fun, and she really missed her old friends.

She wished she hadn’t been so hasty in dropping them all when she met Dan. She had always despised girls who abandoned their mates the minute they found a new man, yet she’d done just that. While it was true that a couple of them had made indiscreet remarks to their mothers, which had got back to hers, mostly she’d kept Dan all to herself because she didn’t want to share him with anyone.

She realized now what a mistake that had been, for they could have been allies. Almost all their mothers were friendly with hers, and if they’d liked Dan, they would’ve talked Clara round. But by cutting herself off from everyone she’d inadvertently created the impression that there was something suspicious about Dan.

Yet even though Fifi knew she alone was responsible for losing her friends, now that she was feeling miserable, she found herself blaming Dan because he hadn’t been welcoming one night when they all called round to the flat.

It was just after they’d got married, and a whole gang of them, including Carol, the friend Fifi’d stood up the night she met Dan, turned up drunk, late one night after the pubs closed.

She and Dan were just about to go to bed, and the flat was a bit of a mess. Dan said her friends were rude, and that it was obvious they’d only called round to check him out. He was curt with them because they were all staggering about, knocking things over and making a great deal of noise. Fifi was embarrassed when Dan asked them to leave, and she’d heard them making sarcastic comments about him as they lurched off down the stairs. She hadn’t seen any of them since.

Even Patty didn’t drop by now. While Fifi knew full well that this was only because of the bad weather, not through ill-feeling, it still made her feel entirely marooned and friendless.

Two weeks crept into three and four, still with no sign of Dan being able to start working again. Fifi found herself thinking wistfully about her old home, of Sunday roasts, of having her clothes washed and ironed for her. In bad moments she even found herself regretting rushing into marriage.

Towards the end of February, after Dan had been off work for seven weeks, he had a letter from the building company telling him that they no longer wanted him when work resumed on the site. They stated that the long layoff had resulted in them needing to make cutbacks and the most productive way to do this was to offer their more senior men overtime when work commenced again.

Dan was savage about it. ‘Bastards!’ he exclaimed. ‘I could’ve got a job working in a warehouse or something all this time. What am I supposed to do now?’

‘Get a job in a warehouse?’ Fifi suggested without any sympathy.

‘I’m a bricklayer,’ he snapped at her. ‘And a bloody good one. I don’t want to be loading lorries or sweeping floors.’

‘This bad weather can’t last much longer,’ she said hopefully, although the forecast was that it was here to stay for a while yet. ‘With spring coming on, all building work will start again soon.’

‘And meanwhile I’ve got to live like a pimp on your wages,’ he ranted, red in the face with anger. ‘I can’t even afford to buy a television or go and have a couple of pints. Your parents will be delighted to be proved right about me.’

All at once they were rowing. Fifi snapped at him and said she was sick of him moping when none of this was her fault. Dan said she was like a spoilt child expecting that everything should be like fairyland. At every retort they got nastier to each other, bringing up anything they could think of, Dan bringing home junk, and Fifi’s lack of housewifely skills.

‘You’re so untidy and messy,’ Dan shouted at her. ‘You think you’re so high and mighty because your father’s a sodding professor, but if it wasn’t for me cleaning up we’d be living in a pig sty.’

‘That would be the right place for you,’ she hurled back at him. ‘You eat with your mouth open, your elbows all over the table. You can’t even hold a knife and fork properly.’

She was shocked at herself for saying something quite so vicious, but he didn’t give her a chance to take it back.

‘Well, I’m sorry if I offend you, Little Miss Perfect Manners,’ he hurled at her, his eyes blazing, ‘but while you were learning all that at your cosy little tea parties, I was having to work in the children’s home’s laundry and out in the grounds. You’ve lived in cloud cuckoo land all your bloody life, never had one day’s hardship.’

That night was the first time they went to bed without kissing goodnight. Fifi lay curled up with her back to Dan, seething with resentment that he had dared to criticize her. She fully expected that he’d apologize and cuddle her, and when he didn’t she became even more resentful.