A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [35]
She looked back to number 11, the child’s home, noticing again the lack of proper curtains, and that one of the panes of glass in the ground-floor window was broken, boarded over with a piece of wood. It was by far the most dilapidated house in the street, the front door battered as if it was constantly kicked in. As her eyes flickered over the house, she saw a man on the top floor looking straight at her.
Fifi backed away in fright. She couldn’t see him clearly as his house was in shadow, and he was only partially visible as he’d been holding back the cloth covering the window. But she sensed something unpleasant about him.
At eight that same evening they had returned the van and finished unpacking. With their own table lamps, a cloth and a vase of flowers on the ugly table, and their picture of the bluebell wood above the gas fire, the living room looked much better.
Dan was sitting in one of the fireside chairs smoking a cigarette and looking around him reflectively. ‘We’ve got enough money saved to buy a square of carpet, some paint and new curtains. I reckon that would turn it into a little palace.’
Fifi half smiled. A little palace it would never be, but she liked the idea of attempting to beautify it. ‘I think we’ll have to get some net curtains too,’ she replied as she arranged some books and a couple of ornaments on a shelf. She went on to tell him about the man she’d seen in the house opposite. ‘I don’t want someone like him gawping in at us.’
‘You, the original nosy parker, complaining of someone watching you!’ Dan exclaimed. ‘If I spotted a gorgeous girl in the house opposite, I’d have my nose pressed up against the window too.’
‘He gave me the creeps,’ she said, tossing back her blonde hair. ‘And you saw what that woman was like with the little girl. I saw the kid again, she looks terribly neglected.’
Dan got up and came over to her and lifting a strand of her hair he ran his fingers down it. ‘What do you know about neglect?’ he said teasingly. ‘I bet you never even had a dirty face as a kid.’
‘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