A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [12]
Fifi could remember how when she was about seven, her mother took her to task for embarrassing another child she met in the park by commenting on the holes in the bottom of her shoes. Her mother had explained that the child’s parents were probably very poor, and she should always be tactful and kinder to people less fortunate than herself.
What a hypocrite her mother had turned out to be! She’d always claimed she would like to see an end to the class system, declaring that bright children from poor homes should be given the same opportunities as the children of the wealthy. Yet now her daughter had taken up with a working-class man, all that tact and kindness had vanished.
Just from the way her mother had looked at Dan when he arrived today, Fifi had known he was never going to be able to win her round. She took in his shiny winkle-picker shoes and his pinstriped suit with its bum-freezer jacket as if that was all the evidence she needed to know he was a bad lot.
As it was raining there was little opportunity for Dan to show off his interest in and knowledge of plants, though he tried hard enough. He stood at the French windows in the sitting room and admired the magnolia tree which was in full bloom.
If her mother was surprised he could actually name it, she didn’t show it, and almost immediately launched into an inquisition about his lodgings.
‘Is it a guest house?’ she asked.
‘The landlady certainly doesn’t treat us like guests,’ Dan replied with one of his wide grins. ‘More like lepers.’
Clara smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes, and Fifi could see she was getting agitated. ‘What I meant was, does she provide breakfast and perhaps an evening meal?’
‘No, all we get is the room, and what she calls “servicing” it. That only amounts to emptying the waste-paper basket and running a vacuum cleaner over the bits of the carpet that show.’
Clara wanted to know how Dan got his clothes washed and where he cooked meals. When he said he went to the launderette further up the road, and mostly ate in cafés, she launched into a lecture about the value of good nutrition and how he should learn to cook for himself.
‘I can cook quite well,’ Dan said. ‘We were taught at the children’s home. But I can’t really be bothered after working all day.’
Fifi was relieved that Dan didn’t reveal that the shared kitchen was overrun with mice, so dirty he could barely bring himself to make a cup of tea in there, and that the other lodgers would help themselves to any food he bought. Yet it was a shame that his explanation suggested he was bone idle.
From then on it seemed to Fifi that her mother was deliberately trying to make Dan feel gauche and ignorant. She brought up subjects as diverse as the invasion of Cuba, the building of the Berlin Wall, Ban the Bomb marches and Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West.
Fifi expected that, like her, Dan wouldn’t know enough about any of these things to discuss them, and her mother would be successful in making him look like a fool. But he did know something about each topic, enough at least to toss the ball into her father’s court and get him to give his views.
He couldn’t resist winding her mother up a little on the subject of Rudolf Nureyev, though. ‘It would have been handy if he’d been a nuclear scientist or something useful, but a man who struts around the stage in tights showing off his carrot and onions doesn’t seem much of a coup to me,’ he said.
The boys laughed, Patty giggled, and even her father