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.
There were so many different nationalities too. In just one day she could hear Germans, French, Greeks, Australians and Americans, and see Africans, West Indians, Arabs, Chinese and Japanese. And the shops catered for everyone – in Kennington alone you could buy anything from a kebab to a yam, fantastic sari material or halal meat. She and Dan had been up to Soho a few times at night, and had been both shocked and amused by the number of strip clubs and dirty-book shops. Yet even more incredible was that it was theatreland too. As people in evening dress hailed cabs or went into the expensive restaurants, just around the corner there were prostitutes plying their trade.
Fifi really didn’t miss Bristol, in fact sometimes she realized that days had gone past without her thinking about it at all. She had written home once, just to give her parents her new address. While she wrote to Patty every week, other friends had only got a postcard telling them how happy she was.
Happy didn’t really adequately describe how she felt; she was joyful. Joining Dan in London had strengthened their marriage and bonded them even closer together. Here
they were on an equal footing, both still rather wide-eyed tourists finding their way around.
Fifi loved shopping in Victor Values. Conventional grocers were so dark and cramped, but this shop had bright lights, with everything priced and arranged in wide aisles. Shops like this had been nicknamed ‘supermarkets’, and most people thought they were a five-minute wonder because they didn’t see how they could keep the prices so low. Fifi didn’t agree; she felt it would be the traditional shops that would be forced out of business.
She was on top of the world as she made her way home along the busy Kennington Park Road with two laden bags, enough food for the whole week. Dan had managed to get them a second-hand fridge the previous day, and she thought it would be bliss not to have to shop for meat and milk every day any more. She was also dying to get home to read the paper she’d bought. The on-going scandal about the call-girl Christine Keeler and John Profumo, the Minister for War, was so exciting. It had all started back in March when Christine’s ex-lover had fired shots into the flat she was sharing with Mandy Rice-Davies, but now it seemed that John Profumo had been sleeping with a call-girl, and that she in turn was sleeping with Ivanov, a Russian attaché. Every day there was a new revelation. Dr Stephen Ward, a society osteopath, owned the flat, the two girls had swum naked in Lord Astor’s swimming pool, there were suggestions of kinky sex and drug-taking, and goodness knows what else would be revealed before long.
About twenty yards before the turning to Dale Street there was a piece of waste ground where some houses had been demolished. As always, Fifi glanced through the broken fence panels because it was an improvised playground for the local children. There were usually dozens of children in there, building camps, playing pirates and occasionally lighting fires. Fifi’s feelings were mixed about it. The child in her approved, for there were few places in London where children could have adventure and freedom. But her adult side worried, for it was after all a dangerous place, full of broken bottles, piles of rubble and other hazards.
To her surprise there were no children there today, despite the good weather. But as she walked on by she heard the sound of crying. Curious, she put down her shopping and stuck her head right through a hole in the fence to take another look.
One lone little girl was in there, sitting on the ground, hands covering her face, crying her heart out.
It was Angela, the youngest of the Muckle children.
As this was the child she’d seen being clouted by her mother on her first day in Dale Street, Fifi had put her under even closer scrutiny than anyone else in the family. It was clear she was the least favoured child. Her parents were always shouting at her, her older brother and sister bullied her, even her Aunt Dora appeared to have it in for her.
If Fifi had seen any of the other three children in apparent distress she would have walked on by. She had noticed the low cunning in their eyes and heard their foul language, and would suspect they were trying to trick her. They were known to snatch money from the hands of children on the way to the shop on a message and they’d slip into any open front door to steal. Fifi had seen them barge into old people, overturning dustbins and breaking milk bottles on the pavement. If reprimanded they would scream vicious abuse.
But Angela wasn’t like the others. She was cowed, not cocky, thin and malnourished. If her eyes met those of an adult they were fearful. Fifi hesitated. Common sense told her it would be better to ignore the child, but her crying was a plaintive bleat which plucked at her heart strings. ‘What’s wrong, Angela?’ she called out.
The child started, uncovering her face. ‘Nothin’,’ she said.
But it wasn’t nothing. She had been punched; the flesh around her eye was so livid and swollen that her eye had all but disappeared.
Fifi assumed it had been done by another child, and that was why no one else was playing there. Remembering times when she’d been bullied as a child herself, she felt she had to do something, if only offer some sympathy.
She went back to the place where the fence had been broken down completely. ‘Who did that to you?’ she asked as she cautiously picked her way over the smashed-up fence panels.
The child’s sharp features, the pallor of her skin, tangled dull hair, missing front teeth and dirty clothes made her an unappealing sight at the best of times, but with this injury to her eye she looked utterly pathetic. As Fifi came closer she started to get up as if intending to flee.
‘Do you know who I am?’ Fifi asked, assuming Angela was frightened at being approached and questioned by a stranger. ‘I live opposite you at number four, my name’s Fifi Reynolds, my husband is called Dan.’
The child nodded. ‘I’ve seen you,’ she whispered. ‘You were painting the walls.’
Fifi felt that meant Angela had watched her from an upper window late in the evening. ‘I used to watch people when I was a little girl,’ she said in an effort to win the child’s trust. ‘I used to make up things about them. Nice things mostly, like they were princesses or ballet dancers. Do you do that?’
Angela made a kind of half-nod.
‘So what did you make up about me?’ Fifi asked.
There was no response, but that was hardly surprising given that Angela’s injury had to be hurting a great deal. ‘Come on,’ Fifi insisted. ‘It’s just a game. I’d like to hear what you made up.’
‘That you were my big sister,’ Angela replied, hanging her head.
At that unexpected and touching admission a lump came up in Fifi’s throat. She could guess where that little fantasy had taken the girl. A place of safety across the street, where there were no fights or rows. A place where everything was clean and bright, perhaps with a big sister washing and brushing her hair for her. Did she imagine someone there who cared enough to cuddle her and make a fuss of her?
‘Who hit you, Angela?’ she asked.
The child shrugged, as if it didn’t matter who was responsible.
‘You must tell me. If you let children carry on being bullies they just get worse and worse. I could talk to their mothers about it.’
‘It weren’t another kid,’ Angela mumbled.
‘Well, who was it then? Was it your mum or your dad?’
‘Dad,’ the child whispered, looking fearfully at Fifi. ‘But don’t you go saying nothin’ or he’ll lay into me twice as bad.’
A surge of anger welled up in Fifi. It was hideous that a grown man could punch a helpless child.
She faltered for a few moments. Her heart told her to take Angela home with her, put some ice on the swelling and get Dan to call the police and report Alfie Muckle. But she was afraid of the repercussions.
‘Why did your dad hit you?’ she asked.
‘Cos I spilt a cuppa tea on ’im,’ Angela said glumly. ‘I couldn’t ’elp it, ’e was in bed, see, I tripped up in the dark.’
Fifi got a nasty mental picture of Alfie lying there in his fetid bedroom, too lazy to work for a living, but energetic enough to lash out at a little girl. She knew then that she had to show Angela not everyone in this world was as uncaring. ‘Come home with me and I’ll bathe your eye,’ she said impulsively.
‘I can’t do that! Dad might see me going in your ’ouse,’ Angela said in horror. ‘’E’ll ’urt you.’
‘If he tries to do that, he’ll be sorry,’ Fifi said more calmly than she felt.
‘You don’t know what ’e’s like.’E wouldn’t just come and ’it you, ’e’d do something sneaky. That’s ’is way.’
Fifi was appalled that such a young child could already be so aware that her father was a devious thug. ‘You let me worry about that,’ she said firmly. ‘Your eye needs some urgent attention. Now come with me.’
Fifi half expected Angela to run off once they got to Dale Street, but she didn’t, not even when Yvette Dupré came out of the shop right in front of them.
‘’Ello, Fifi,’ she said. ‘’Ow are you?’
Dan referred to her as the French mistress; he said her accent was the sexiest he’d eve
r heard. Fifi agreed, but it was the only sexy thing about the woman. Someone had said that she wasn’t even forty, but she looked middle-aged in clothes left over from the war years. On the rare occasions when she went out she wore a grey mid-calf-length fitted coat and a felt hat. Dan called it her Resistance outfit, and said she wore it to hide her astoundingly voluptuous figure, which no man would be able to resist.
Fifi had called on her just a few days after they moved in to ask her to replace the zip in the skirt of the suit she needed for interviews. She found Yvette warm and friendly, and although she didn’t invite her in, she said she would gladly replace the zip and bring it back later.
Dan was of course entirely wrong about her figure; she was very thin, no curves at all showing in a plain dark brown wool dress. Yet close up she was rather beautiful, with large, very dark eyes and a soft, full mouth. Fifi didn’t understand why she pulled her hair back off her face so severely, and why when she made elegant, fashionable clothes for other people, she should choose to look so prim and frumpy herself. She hoped eventually to get to know the woman well enough to persuade her into covering up the grey in her hair with some dye, to wear makeup and change her style of clothes. But she hadn’t got anywhere near close enough for that yet.
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Fifi replied in answer to the question of how she was. Normally she was eager to stop to chat with Yvette because she was so intriguing, but with Angela in tow she needed to get home as quickly as possible.
‘Sacré bleu,’ Yvette exclaimed as she saw Angela’s rapidly blackening eye. ‘’Oo did that to you?’
‘Need you ask?’ Fifi said. ‘I’m taking her home with me to bathe it.’
‘Ees that wise?’ Yvette said softly.
A Lesser Evil Page 10