A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [51]
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