A Lesser Evil Read online

  ‘She looks half-starved, and her dress and shoes were too big,’ Fifi replied indignantly.

  ‘So her folks are poor, that’s all. Now, let’s go down to the pub and check out the rest of our new neighbours.’

  The Rifleman was packed by the time Dan and Fifi got there. They squeezed through the crowd to the end of the bar where there was a little space, and while Dan waited to be served, Fifi looked around her eagerly.

  She liked what she saw, for this was what she expected of a London pub. It had atmosphere, colour, jollity and a huge range of age groups from those barely old enough to drink, to the very elderly.

  There were slickly suited young men with the latest college-boy hair-styles and winkle-picker shoes, girls with teetering beehive hair-dos, Cleopatra-style eye makeup and skirts so tight they could hardly walk. There were old stooped men with rheumy eyes, watching the proceedings from their seats in corners. Brassy women, mousy women, men still in working clothes who’d forgotten to go home for their tea, others who looked as though they hadn’t got a home to go to, and a whole gang of men between twenty-five and forty wearing expensive suits and don’t-mess-with-me expressions.

  A thick-set man in his sixties smiled at Fifi. ‘How are you settling in?’ he asked. ‘I’m Frank Ubley. I live downstairs to you on the ground floor. I saw you moving in, and I would’ve offered to help you carry your stuff up, but I’d just had a bath and I wasn’t dressed.’

  ‘I’m Fifi Reynolds and that’s my husband, Dan,’ Fifi said, pointing to Dan who was just paying for their drinks. ‘We’re more or less straight now, thank you. Though we’d like to paint the place. Is your wife with you tonight?’

  ‘I’m a widower,’ he said. ‘My wife died four years ago.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Fifi said, a little embarrassed. ‘I just assumed a married couple lived on the ground floor as the net curtains are so white.’

  ‘A man alone doesn’t have to become a slob,’ he said, and smiled. Fifi noticed he had nice eyes, grey with very dark lashes. ‘I like to keep the place proper. My June was very particular, she washed the nets every two weeks without fail. She wouldn’t like it if I let things go.’

  Dan came over with their drinks then and she introduced him to Frank. ‘Who lives on the first floor?’ she went on to ask.

  ‘Miss Diamond,’ Frank replied. ‘She works for the telephone company, and she rules the roost.’

  ‘She’s an ogre, is she?’ Dan asked with a grin.

  Frank chuckled. ‘She can be if she doesn’t like a body. She’s particular, you see, just like my June was. You leave a ring round the bath, make too much noise or don’t take your turn sweeping the stairs, then there’s hell to pay.’

  Fifi could see now why the bathroom had been so unexpectedly clean, the only nice surprise of the day. She approved of the pub too, and now meeting Frank cheered her still more as he looked and sounded a decent, rather fatherly type. A comforting person to have as a neighbour.

  She made some remark about being glad she hadn’t got to share the bathroom with messy people, and brought the subject round to the house across the street.

  ‘I saw a little girl coming out of there. She looked sad.’

  ‘She would be, with folks like them,’ Frank said with a grimace. ‘The Muckles are a disgrace. Filthy ways, lying, cheating curs.’

  ‘You don’t like them then?’ Dan joked.

  ‘Like them!’ Frank’s voice rose a couple of octaves. ‘They need exterminating!’

  ‘I can’t believe anyone is called Muckle,’ Fifi giggled. ‘Maybe they are that way because of their name.’

  ‘Their name is the only thing you can laugh about,’ Frank said, grimacing with disgust. ‘If I was a Catholic I’d be crossing myself whenever I heard it.’

  A Polish man came along then, and Frank introduced him as his friend Stan and said he lived next door but one. Despite Stan’s strong Polish accent he had the manner of an English gentleman, very correct, a little stiff but also rather charming, and his long, mournful face reminded Fifi of a stray dog she’d once taken home.

  ‘You have such pretty hair,’ he said appreciatively. ‘It is good to see you leave it loose, I do not like this fashion they called the bird’s nest.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Fifi blushed at the unexpected compliment. ‘But I think the style you mean is called a beehive.’

  ‘To me it looks like a bird’s nest, and all stuck up with that lacquer,’ he made a grimace, ‘a man would never want to touch such a thing.’

  Dan ran his fingers through a lock of Fifi’s hair protectively, giving both Frank and Stan a clear message she could be admired, but not touched by anyone but him. ‘Let me buy you both a drink to celebrate our first night in London together. We’d begun to think we’d never be able to find a flat here.’

  Both Frank and Stan said they’d like a pint. ‘I hope London will be good for you,’ Frank said, looking from Fifi to Dan almost fondly. ‘I’m glad to have young people in the house again. When my daughter lived nearby she was in and out all the time with her children. I miss all the laughter and chatter.’

  ‘Where does she live now?’ Fifi asked, as always wanting to know everything about her new neighbours.

  ‘In Brisbane in Australia,’ Frank replied sadly. ‘June and I were intending to go out there and join them, but after she died I felt it was too late for me to uproot myself.’

  By the time they were on their second drinks, Frank and Stan had pointed out several other neighbours and given Fifi and Dan a potted history of most of them. There were Cecil and Ivy Helass at number 6, solid, reliable folk who had the only phone in the road, and had four children aged from sixteen to twenty-two. John and Vera Bolton lived at number 13, and they were described as flashy. The names of the other neighbours and which houses they lived in went over Fifi’s head, but the one family Frank kept coming back to was the Muckles. It was clear the man had a real grudge against the family, for as he told them the child Fifi had seen earlier in the day was called Angela, he looked fit to burst with something more.

  As always when Fifi got a whiff of scandal or intrigue, she was desperate to know the whole story. Bit by bit she pumped both Frank and Stan for more.

  It appeared that Angela was the youngest of eight children, four of whom still lived across the street, and that their mother Molly was what Frank called ‘a woman of easy virtue’.

  ‘Then there’s the two half-wit relations, shacked up together,’ he spat out. ‘God help us all when they produce an offspring!’

  Fifi looked at Dan and saw his lips were twitching with silent laughter.

  When Stan intervened to say almost apologetically that everyone in Dale Street had good reason to hate the Muckles, and that but for them the street would be a good place to live, Dan asked why they hadn’t been evicted.

  ‘You can’t evict people who own their house.’ Frank shook his head sadly. ‘That’s the real problem. Alfie lords it over us. He knows there’s nothing we can do about him. The only place he can’t come in is this pub, thank God. He was banned from here years ago and it will never be lifted.’

  ‘How does someone like him get to buy a house?’ Fifi asked.

  ‘The legend goes that his grandfather won it from the man who built the street in a game of cards,’ Frank said. ‘Only Mrs Jarvis has lived here that long, and she was only a child at the time, so you can’t say it’s absolute truth. But the house was passed down to Alfie’s father, and then to Alfie. The house ain’t the only thing passed down through the generations, though.’

  ‘What else?’ Dan asked, his lean face alight with interest.

  ‘None of the Muckle men has ever done an honest day’s work, they chose women who became their punch-bags, and they pump out children at an indecent rate,’ Frank said with indignation.

  ‘They are not what you know as a family,’ Stan chipped in. ‘I would call them a tribe. Right now there is only Alfie, Molly and their four younger children, plus Dora and A
lfie’s nephew, Mike.’

  ‘Dora is Molly’s backward sister,’ Frank interrupted. ‘Completely doolally, and like a walking jumble sale. I once saw her going out in odd shoes and just a petticoat!’

  Dan winked at Fifi. He was enjoying this, and she had no doubt he would be imitating both Frank and Stan when they got home.

  ‘But it never stops at just the immediate family,’ Stan went on, getting a little agitated now. ‘This number can swell at any time. They have so many relatives who come and stay, and there’s the card parties.’

  Fifi couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw Frank send a warning glance at Stan.

  ‘Card parties!’ she said brightly. ‘Like bridge or something?’

  ‘Look, Stan, there’s Ted over there,’ Frank said suddenly, pointing to a fat man with a big red face at the other end of the bar. ‘We must catch him and see when the next darts match is.’ He turned back to Fifi and Dan and apologized for rushing off, but said if they needed any help or wanted to borrow any tools, they only had to ask.

  ‘The Man Who Said Too Much,’ Dan said in a mock chilling voice as the two older men left them. ‘Maybe the card game is Happy Families and they won’t let Frank or Stan play?’

  ‘They sound a monstrous family,’ Fifi said. ‘But I suppose you think they were making it all up?’

  ‘I suspect a bit of exaggeration,’ he said with a grin. ‘But I especially liked the bit about dopey Dora.’

  By closing time Dan and Fifi had met several other neighbours, Cecil and Ivy Helass, Mrs Witherspoon from the corner shop, and a man called Wally who had only recently moved into a room below Stan, and they all had something more to add about the Muckles.

  Mrs Witherspoon was a plump, seemingly kindly middle-aged woman, and she claimed they targeted any new people in the street, asking to borrow things and telling them hard-luck stories. She advised Fifi and Dan never to invite any of them in, as they would be back to rob them as soon as they got an opportunity.

  Ivy Helass said that Stan had seen the two older children locked out of the house one afternoon when there was thick snow back in the winter, so he brought them in to get warm. Two days later he came home to find he’d been burgled, and two solid silver photograph frames taken.

  ‘It was shameful,’ Ivy said indignantly. ‘That poor man lost his wife and two daughters in the Warsaw uprising, and all he had left was the two pictures of his family. They meant everything to him, and those children must have thrown the pictures away before they sold the frames.’

  Wally said that Alfie was a peeping Tom.

  Fifi didn’t like the look of Wally at all. He had a beer gut spilled over his trousers, and food stains down his shirt. Although he was only about thirty, she thought she wouldn’t be surprised to find he was a flasher himself.

  But he claimed Alfie was in the habit of climbing along the wall at the backs of the houses, looking into lighted rooms. He warned her she should keep her curtains closed at night.

  Despite the rather tedious repetitions about the Muckles, the warmth of the welcome from their new neighbours went a long way to reassure Fifi that Kennington wasn’t such a bad place to live. By the time they got home after the pub had shut, with a bag of chips each, she was feeling much happier and a little drunk.

  ‘It’s beginning to grow on me,’ she said as she sat down and looked about the living room. With just the light from the table lamps and all their things in place, it looked quite homely.

  ‘Even with the monsters across the road?’ Dan asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘Or is that part of the attraction?’

  Fifi giggled. Dan was always teasing her about her curiosity. ‘They sound much too awful even for me,’ she said. ‘That woman with the black hair who said she lived next to the coal yard said their house is absolutely filthy. She said none of the children were ever toilet trained, and they’d just do it on the floor. She claimed the council has been round to fumigate the place loads of times. She said they have terrible fights in there, and there’s always dodgy people coming and going.’

  ‘Don’t take it too seriously,’ Dan said evenly. ‘People do get a bit vindictive about anyone different from themselves.’

  Fifi knew he was right about that. Her own parents had proved it by being so nasty about Dan.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll put them under close observation,’ she joked. ‘I could make a study of them. Log what they do and at what time. If they really are responsible for all the crime around here, it could be useful to the police.’

  ‘Then you’d better have a chat with the French dressmaker,’ Dan said with a wide grin.

  He had been far more intrigued to hear about the woman from Paris who sat sewing by her window all day than by the more salacious stories about her next-door neighbours. Apparently she only went out to give fittings for her wealthy clients, but it was generally supposed she knew everything that happened in the street. ‘She might do some shifts for you. Or maybe I should study her!’

  ‘We could call ourselves “Super Snoops”,’ Fifi giggled. ‘For a slogan we could have “Nothing gets past us”.’

  Dan laughed. He was so relieved Fifi seemed happier now. For a minute or two this afternoon he’d thought she was going to take the next train back to Bristol.

  He loved her to pieces, just to look at her lovely face made his heart melt, and he still couldn’t quite believe that a girl like her could love him. But there were times when she was like a spoiled child, expecting life to be one long picnic in the sun. He’d got her well away from her parents’ influence at last, and though it would probably be another nail in his coffin that he’d brought her to live here, Fifi needed a dose of reality.

  Chapter five

  Fifi bounced along the street. She was happy because it was Saturday, a lovely sunny day, and once she’d got the shopping she and Dan were going out for a picnic in Hyde Park. As she reached Mrs Jarvis’s house at the end of the street, on an impulse she knocked on her door.

  ‘Hello,’ she said as the old lady answered. ‘I’m going down to Victor Values, is there anything I can get for you while I’m there?’

  ‘Is that the new-fangled place where you have to serve yourself?’

  Fifi smiled. Although Alice Jarvis was over eighty and very frail, she didn’t miss much that was going on. Fifi had spoken to her for the first time a few days after they moved into Dale Street, a month ago now, and had been invited in for a cup of tea. The old lady lived in a Victorian time warp, still with the same heavy, highly polished or over-stuffed furniture her parents had brought with them when they moved in when she was a girl. She had four siblings, but she’d never left home as they did; when she married Mr Jarvis, he moved in with her and her parents.

  Mrs Jarvis’s one and only concession to modern times was the electric lighting, which she’d reluctantly agreed to have put in after the war, a short while after her husband died. Her home reflected the lives and personalities of all those who had lived there: a lace-trimmed tablecloth made by her mother, a grandfather clock that had been her father’s pride and joy, dozens of framed sepia photographs of her brothers and sisters, and the piano in the parlour which they’d all played and sung around.

  ‘Yes, you do serve yourself,’ Fifi replied. ‘But it’s ever so much cheaper than the grocer’s.’

  ‘It sounds American to me.’ Mrs Jarvis sniffed with disapproval. ‘I don’t hold with anything from there. And I like someone to serve me.’

  ‘I’d rather save money,’ Fifi said with a smile. ‘And if I’m going for you, you’re not going to miss being served personally.’

  Mrs Jarvis wavered. She looked very stern in her old-fashioned black dress and thick stockings, with her white hair tied up tightly in a bun, but Fifi had discovered she was a warm and friendly person. ‘Well, I could do with a quarter of tea and a packet of chocolate biscuits, if it’s not too much trouble,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my niece and her husband coming tomorrow afternoon. They usually take me out to tea somewhere,
but it’s so nice out in the garden now, they might want to stay here.’

  Fifi had a feeling Mrs Jarvis lived on little else but tea and biscuits; she hadn’t seen any sign of food in her kitchen when she was in there last week. But she didn’t know her well enough to start cross-examining her yet.

  ‘Have you finished your painting?’ Mrs Jarvis asked. The last time she had seen Fifi she’d remarked on the paint in her hair.

  ‘Yes, it looks lovely,’ Fifi said eagerly. ‘The living room is pale green and the bedroom cream. We’ve bought a new carpet too. Miss Diamond thinks it very tasteful.’

  ‘I hope she’s kind to you?’ Mrs Jarvis said anxiously. ‘She can be very fierce.’

  Fifi grinned. Miss Diamond in the rooms downstairs to her was a supervisor at the telephone exchange and quite formidable, laying down the law about everything. ‘I can give as good as I get,’ she said. ‘She’s got a good heart really. I’d rather have her living downstairs than certain people in this road.’

  ‘Did you hear them last night?’ Mrs Jarvis said, raising her hands in an expression of horror and alarm. ‘Shouting and bawling, and the language!’

  She was of course speaking about the Muckles. Hardly a night passed without something going on there. If it wasn’t a fight between Molly and Alfie, children screaming or music blaring out, it was the Friday night cards party when seedy-looking men left in the small hours, banging car doors and honking horns.

  Last Friday, Dan had wanted to go over there because one of the women was screaming as if she was being viciously beaten. But fortunately it stopped suddenly and Dan let it go.

  ‘We thought everyone was exaggerating about them when we first moved in,’ Fifi replied. ‘I don’t really believe that the police can’t do anything about them. Surely they could charge them with disturbing the peace, if nothing else?’

  ‘They say Alfie bribes the police to turn a blind eye,’ Mrs Jarvis said conspiratorially. ‘I wish I could bribe someone to burn that house down and them with it. Mr Jarvis went over there once to try and stop their noise and soon after he was attacked coming home one evening. We couldn’t prove it was them, but everyone knew it was. They broke his jaw and his ribs – they are worse than animals.’