A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [7]
As children, their home was open to all their friends. Fifi’s father would erect tents for them in the garden, play cricket with them and hang ropes on the trees for them to swing on. Her mother never minded how many extra mouths she had to feed, and she would run up costumes for little shows they put on, hide Easter eggs in the garden, haul huge boxes back from the grocery shop for them to make into toys or houses. She was there bathing grazed knees, comforting them when they didn’t get school prizes, celebrating when they did, always loving and caring.
Dan hadn’t had any of that.
He didn’t invite sympathy; he was too amusing, too manly and confident. Yet all the same Fifi knew that her parents would take one look at him and disapprove. What they wanted for her was a man from a similar background, well bred, with a good family and excellent prospects. Fifi didn’t feel her father was a snob – he liked nothing better than getting students from working-class homes attending his lectures, and he made himself accessible to them to give them extra help. But neither he nor her mother would welcome a roaming bricklayer with a poor education for their daughter.
To be truthful, Fifi had always imagined herself marrying a man in one of the professions. She’d never been attracted to louts that hung around on street corners or stumbled drunkenly about dance halls. All her previous boyfriends had been friends of other friends; not one had been an unknown quantity. And she had been out with all of them in a group situation before she took the chance and met them alone. It was completely out of character for her to behave the way she had tonight. But it felt as if it was meant to be.
She knew Dan was special. He might not be educated, but he was clever, funny and strong. When he’d kissed her goodnight at the bus stop, she had almost cried because it was so heartstoppingly wonderful.
The few short hours she’d spent with him had been the most memorable and happy of her whole life. Just before they left the last pub, ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You’ sung by Elvis came on the jukebox. They’d kind of looked at each other and smiled, and Dan sang along with it in an amazingly good impersonation of Elvis, all the time looking right at her. She supposed that was pretty corny, but it had made her feel all fluttery inside.
Just remembering his kiss made her tingle too. No other man had ever stirred her that way or made her feel she could easily lose control. She and her friends often discussed whether they would go to bed with someone before they were married. Fifi had always been insistent that she wouldn’t. But tonight she’d experienced real desire, and she realized that those feeble little flutterings she’d felt in the past with boys were nothing compared with how Dan made her feel.
What was she going to do? If she told her parents about him, they’d ask her to bring him home. That might frighten him off. If she saw him in secret and her parents found out, they’d assume she had something to be ashamed of.
‘Wait and see how it turns out,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Maybe you won’t feel the same tomorrow.’
‘You look even more beautiful than I remembered,’ Dan said as they met by the Odeon the following night.
‘You look pretty handsome yourself,’ Fifi retorted. She had rushed home from work, wolfed down her tea and spent an hour getting ready, so she had half expected him to com-ment on how good she looked. But he was transformed, wearing a brown pinstriped Italian suit with a fashionable short jacket, white shirt and highly polished shoes. She hoped she