A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [53]
‘Très jolie,’ Yvette said, not knowing the English then for ‘You look pretty’.
She thought Molly understood it was a compliment as she smiled, and Yvette remembered thinking that she wished she knew the words to say that Molly should smile more, as it made her look beautiful.
She had a voluptuous, very curvy figure with a small waist and full breasts, and the cream blouse emphasized her shape and gave a becoming glow to her complexion. Even her peroxide-blonde hair looked lovely that night, for she’d just washed and curled it.
Yvette indicated that Molly was to take off her clothes, and stood waiting with the blue and white summer dress she was about to fit in her hands. She noticed an old scar above Molly’s right breast when she had stripped down to her petticoat, but it wasn’t until she turned for the back of the bodice to be pinned in place that Yvette saw all the other scars.
Livid red ones and old faded brown ones criss-crossed her back and Yvette was so shocked she almost stuck a pin into Molly’s flesh.
She had no English words for ‘What has happened to you?’ but she didn’t need to ask that anyway. She knew they were the scars of beatings, almost certainly achieved with a thin cane, because she had such scars herself.
She had tears in her eye as she fitted the dress, and Molly saw them and wiped them away tenderly with her finger, smiling at her. She said something Yvette couldn’t understand, but by the tone of her voice she felt Molly was assuring her it was nothing.
Yvette knew now to her cost that Molly saw sympathy as weakness and gullibility. She was soon asking to borrow money which she never repaid, and to dump her children on Yvette for her to look after. She should’ve refused and backed away as soon as she saw she was being used, but she felt sorry for Molly and indebted to her too.
Yvette knew now that Molly was never the victim she took her for. The truth was, for every blow she received from Alfie, he got one back, and she got some kind of perverted thrill from violence.
In sixteen years Yvette must have witnessed and overheard hundreds of shocking and depraved scenes, and she knew now that even if Molly were to meet a rich man who would overlook her drinking and sluttish ways, she couldn’t leave Alfie. They were joined in some unholy bond which had nothing to do with love.
But Yvette didn’t know any of that back in the late forties. She learned it gradually as her understanding of English improved and the gossip from the street began to filter through to her. Sadly, by then she had already become trapped in Molly’s web.
Yvette could still remember the day the woman boasted that she and Alfie frequently had other sexual partners. Yvette was so shocked she listened in silence as her neighbour gleefully described the thrill they got out of watching each other with someone else. Her language was graphic, intended to upset and disgust Yvette. Molly was in fact doing to Yvette what she so often did to Alfie – trying to provoke a fight.
Yvette had made so many excuses for Molly up until that point. But that day she suddenly realized that this wasn’t a woman who was merely overstretched and unable to cope. She actually thrived on chaos and she had a black heart. She was also trying her best to recruit Yvette into her sordid games.
It was only then that Yvette attempted to distance herself from the entire Muckle family. She didn’t answer the door to the children, and ignored Molly calling to her over the back fence. Even when Angela, the last child, was born, she didn’t weaken and offer any help. But living in such close proximity, she couldn’t block out what went on next door.
In the Muckle household bodies were shared like food and drink. Molly had sex with two of Alfie’s brothers while he looked on, and Alfie regularly used Dora, Molly’s backward sister. Recently, Mike, Alfie’s young nephew, had come to live with them, and now it was he who had laid claim to Dora. But Yvette had heard Mike rutting noisily out in the backyard with Molly on several occasions since then, when the children were