A Lesser Evil

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘You aren’t a guttersnipe,’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t say such things.’

  ‘There’s only this much,’ he said, holding up two fingers an inch apart, ‘between me and the Muckles. If I’d married someone like Molly, there’d be even less.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Fifi retorted. ‘You’ve always worked, you aren’t a thief or a bully, you’ve got a brain, for goodness’ sake! There’s a million miles between you.’

  Dan shook his head. ‘I’ll only think that when I can carry you over the threshold of our own house.’

  A month later, at the very end of July, Fifi sat in a chair by the open window knitting a little white baby jacket. Yvette had helped her get started, and though she still kept dropping stitches, she found it a rather soothing pastime.

  It had been a scorching day, and though it was nine in the evening, it was still very hot and sticky, without any breeze. Dan was working late, as he had done every evening for the past two weeks. The office building he was working on was behind schedule, and all the men were doing overtime to catch up. Fifi didn’t really mind being alone, but she was concerned that Dan was working too hard: last night he’d been so tired when he got home that he could barely speak.

  She was finding her own journey to and from work hard. She felt she couldn’t breathe on the tube, and although her stomach had only the slightest curve so far, the waistbands of her skirts were now too tight. Sometimes on the way home she had to get off the tube because she felt so giddy and sick in the crowds.

  She wondered if this was something that would go as the pregnancy advanced, or whether it would get worse. Her mother would have been the right person to advise her, but her parents hadn’t yet replied to the letter she wrote to inform them. That was over two weeks ago, so she could only suppose they thought a baby was another calamity.

  Putting down her knitting, Fifi turned to look out of the window. All the children who had been playing in the street earlier had gone in now, but Angela was still outside, perched on her doorstep playing cat’s cradle with a bit of wool, all by herself.

  Fifi had been so preoccupied by her pregnancy that she hadn’t thought much about Angela in the past weeks. She saw her often enough in the street, but Angela had very little to say, just a shy flickering smile, the odd halting question about where Fifi was going. The bruising around her eye was all gone now, but she still looked pitiful because she was so pale and thin.

  Now the schools had broken up for the holiday, Fifi doubted the child got anything to eat at midday. Yvette had said she was pushed out of the house in the morning and stayed outside all day.

  Fifi had become very friendly with Yvette since she made the curtains for her. They were only cheap cotton from the market, but the design of lilies on a pale green background was very pretty and they fitted from the ceiling right down to the floor and made the room look really swish. Each time Fifi looked at them she smiled because they were so lovely and she thought Yvette was very clever.

  Yet she was puzzling too. Not just her frumpy clothes, or the hermit-like life she led, or even her flat which was a complete shambles – Fifi had got used to all that. The puzzling part about Yvette was that she gave nothing away about herself.

  She had great warmth, she took others’ troubles to heart and often refused to accept any payment for little sewing jobs she did for neighbours. She was also intensely interested in other people, so why didn’t she ever reveal her hopes, dreams, past mistakes or glories?

  Her ground-floor flat was overrun with pattern books, the walls almost hidden with fashion pictures cut from magazines. Boxes of fabrics and trimmings spilled out on to the floor, cards of buttons and reels of coloured thread covered almost every surface. Yet there appeared to be no personal belongings, not even a photograph. She fitted her clients in their own homes, admitting she would be embarrassed for them to come to her. Fifi could only assume, in the absence of any information, that Yvette had no family or real friends of her own. She appeared to live her entire life at second hand, listening to her clients talk about their families, holidays and social life.

  Yet Fifi loved going over to see Yvette. She was so welcoming, so interested, and she had a kind of wisdom about life and people that was quite unique. That was why she was the first person after Dan that Fifi told about the expected baby.

  ‘That ees wonderful,’ Yvette exclaimed in delight, clapping her hands with joy. ‘You must be so ’appy.’

  Fifi had confided that she wasn’t certain about that, and then went on to tell her about her parents disapproving of Dan, and how she was afraid if they didn’t manage to get a house of their own they’d get stuck in Dale Street.

  ‘Then you must, ’ow they say?, take the bull by the horns,’ Yvette said with an enigmatic smile. ‘Become the strong one.’

  Fifi took that to mean Yvette thought she should push Dan harder. But that wasn’t necessary – since she’d told him about the baby he wanted to work all the hours God sent. They’d stopped going out for meals and if they went for a drink it was only for one. He was taking fatherhood very seriously.

  It occurred to Fifi that Yvette had misjudged Dan in much the same way her parents had. Why did they assume he was feckless and weak? That wasn’t how he was at all.

  *

  Yvette glanced up at the windows across the street as she reached to draw her own curtains. She could see Fifi silhouetted in her window on the top floor and guessed she was alone again. She hoped Dan really was working late and not down the pub with his workmates.

  Yvette really liked Fifi. But then she was the kind of girl almost anyone would like, for she was beautiful, sunny-natured and so full of life. She remembered how back in early June Fifi had come rushing in to tell her that Dr Stephen Ward, the osteopath at the centre of the big vice scandal, had committed suicide. Yvette had taken very little interest in the affair of Christine Keeler and John Profumo, for she’d known people back in France far worse, but Fifi knew every last thing about it, and the girl’s passionate interest made her laugh. Yvette hoped for Fifi’s sake that she’d move on soon, before this street changed her.

  In the sixteen years Yvette had spent here, she’d observed how the street made people apathetic. It was almost as if there was something poisonous in the soot-laden air. No one of course really wanted to live here, except perhaps old Mrs Jarvis and the Muckles who’d never known anywhere else. Everyone said it was just a temporary place to live until they found something better. Yet almost all those who had arrived since the war ended were still here.

  Stan the Pole had told her he was going to find work on a farm. Miss Diamond had her sights set on a place on Clapham Common. Frank and June Ubley were intending to join their daughter and grandchildren in Australia. But Stan was still a dustman and Miss Diamond was still complaining that it wasn’t what she was used to. Sadly, June Ubley had died, but Frank stayed on, keeping his net curtains snowy-white in memory of his wife, when there was nothing to stop him going to Australia. There was always farm work available for a man like Stan, and as for Miss Diamond, surely she could reply to any of those advertisements for flats that required a mature business lady with good references?

  Yet Yvette knew why they hadn’t moved on, for the street had affected her too. She loathed everything about it – the meanness, squalor, lack of sunshine, the dust and noise from the coal yard, and the Muckles next door above all else. She could afford to live somewhere better, so why was she still here?

  She had told Fifi it was because she couldn’t face searching for another flat or packing up all her belongings. That was true to a point, but it was also the neighbours, with the exception of the Muckles, who kept her here.

  In the absence of real family, these people had taken their place. As she sat sewing in her window, their familiar faces made her feel less alone. She knew they were like her, the flotsam and jetsam of humanity, tossed up here to live out the remainder of their damaged lives. Some had shared their stories with her, and it made her feel
better about herself because they valued her ability to listen and comfort.

  Without that, what would she have? Her clients were not friends; they might value her dressmaking skills, but not her as a person. If she lost her sight, or her fingers became crippled with arthritis, she would never hear from them again. But that wouldn’t be true of her neighbours here, they’d care enough to call and ask if she needed shopping or a fire lit. They would invite her into their homes, for though being French set her apart from them a little, they sensed she was truly one of them.

  She might ache to live somewhere clean, quiet and beautiful, but deep down she felt this was all she deserved.

  In Fifi she saw something akin to that too. Intelligent, pretty and from a very good family, she was a girl who should have had the world at her feet. Yet maybe because she had burned her bridges by marrying Dan, she had got into the mindset that she now belonged in the kind of world he came from.

  Dan was certainly very handsome and he had a rough charm too with his ready smile and his irrepressible sense of humour. Yvette liked him very much. But the fact remained that he was a working-class man and he couldn’t transform himself into anything else.

  Yvette knew Fifi saw living in London as a bit of an adventure. She saw the people in this street as ‘characters’ rather than life’s casualties. But once her baby was born, with only Dan’s wages coming in, she was likely to view things very differently. Had she realized those characters were likely to complain about a crying baby? She would be lonely and bored stuck in those two small rooms all day, and once she started complaining, Dan might do exactly what other men in the street did – run off to the pub.

  Yet worse still to Yvette’s mind was that Fifi would lose that sparkle of hers, and that every day she’d find herself a little further alienated from her own family and the middle-class world she grew up in.

  She deserved better than that.

  Yvette knew these things because it was what her own mother had endured. She had run off with a man her parents considered a bad lot, and they were right about him too, for he did leave her when the going got tough after Yvette was born. Mama had sewed from first light until it was too dark to see, but they still often went to bed hungry. Yvette wondered what she would make of her daughter ending up in much the same situation, albeit without a child. She thought she had secured safety and the chance of a much better life for Yvette by sending her away when the Germans took Paris. Perhaps it was as well that she died before the war ended, for it would have killed her anyway if she’d known what happened to her child.

  Yvette could remember her first night here in Dale Street very clearly. She was so glad to have a home of her own at last that she barely noticed it was virtually a slum. She was just twenty-one, and two years had passed since the war and all the horrors she’d endured during it.

  She had next to nothing to unpack, just a change of clothes, a towel, a few shillings in her purse and a small bag of groceries. She knew no more than a dozen words of English and it was so cold that she had to wear all her clothes to bed. But she was happy because she’d been taken on as a seamstress in Mayfair, to start the following day, and she believed she’d left all the hurt and shame back in France.

  Mr and Mrs Jarvis were the first to offer her a welcome. Mr Jarvis had been in France during the First War, and knew a little of the language, and he invited her over to share their Sunday lunch. Sadly, he died a few months later, but Yvette would always remember him fondly, for that Sunday he had taught her so many English words by naming things and making her repeat them.

  Yet even through the cold and loneliness of that winter of 1947, she still found many reasons to be glad she’d come to London. First, she found she stopped dwelling on the past so much. The nightmares she’d had virtually every night for so long became less and less frequent. She liked the polite way the English queued for buses and their rations, never pushing in as they did in Paris. She liked their affection for the King and the Royal Family, and the way people tried to help her when they realized she was French. But above all she liked London itself. It might be battered from the war, with weed-strewn bomb sites everywhere, nothing much in the shops, and so many people living under terrible conditions, but there were still many beautiful buildings and wonderful parks. She found much to admire in the English, too, for they held themselves with pride. They grumbled of course, but she also saw that they pitched in to help one another, and the weak and the old in local communities were supported by their neighbours.

  Yvette remembered how at the height of her loneliness, she brought scraps of silk and velvet home from the work-shop. She would lie in her bed rubbing them comfortingly against her cheek, just as she used to do as a child with her mother’s dressmaking scraps.

  As a little girl the pieces of luxurious cloth had transported her into day-dreams. She would see herself and her mother living in a grand house; the table would be laden with every kind of expensive food and they’d be wearing beautiful clothes. Her mother was never toiling at her sewing-machine in these dreams, she would be playing a piano, dancing or picking roses in the garden. And she smiled all the time.

  Yvette’s adult day-dreams were far less fanciful. The touch and the smell of fine fabrics were merely reassurance that she had landed in a safe, female-only world. She might use her dressmaking skills to ensure her ladies got male attention at balls, parties and weddings, but she didn’t have to suffer it herself.

  Sometimes these same ladies told her she had beautiful eyes and they held their own clothes up to her, clearly suggesting that if only she’d dress in something more colourful and fashionable, she would soon have admirers. Yvette would giggle and blush, and let them think it was timidity that prevented her.

  *

  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.