A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [52]
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