A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [80]
Alfie was dressed amazingly smartly for him in a shirt and grey trousers instead of his usual grubby vest with braces over it. With him were the three older children, Alan, the sulky-looking teenager, equally tidy, Mary and Joan in clean dresses and white socks. All of them were carrying bags full of what looked like towels and picnic things.
‘Come on,’ Alfie shouted back to Molly who was dithering in the doorway. ‘You wanted the bloody day out. If we don’t get out now it won’t be worth going.’
Molly seemed to be arguing with him about something. She kept looking back in to the hall, but her voice was too indistinct to make out what she was saying.
‘Serves ’er bloody well right,’ Alfie bawled out. ‘Now, come on or I’ll change me mind about it.’
Molly looked the way she did when she went out alone in the evenings, wearing a pink dress with a full skirt and no curlers. As Fifi watched, Dora and Mike appeared too. Only Angela was missing.
The front door was slammed behind them, and Fifi watched in fascination as the family made their way up the road.
They were a hilarious sight en masse. Alfie tried to swagger, but it looked more like a waddle; Molly teetered unsteadily on her high heels, and the children were slinking along in the gutter, heads down. Dora was wearing a garish bright yellow dress with a full skirt and a kind of sailor collar trimmed with red. Fifi wondered where on earth she managed to get such a frightful outfit, and had some sympathy with Mike who was trying to distance himself from her as she tried possessively to hold his arm.
They had turned the corner when Fifi remembered about the crying child earlier, and she wondered if it could have been Angela. Had they left her alone in the house as a punishment when they were having a day out somewhere?
As she ate her breakfast Fifi watched the Muckles’ house. Angela spent a great deal of time looking out of the top bedroom window, but she wasn’t there now. The usual blanket was covering it, and Fifi couldn’t hear any crying. It was of course possible she’d been sent to a friend or relative for the day, but Fifi couldn’t imagine Alfie and Molly being that well organized.
It was lovely out in Frank’s garden, a tiny oasis of beauty and peace. Although Fifi could hear traffic in the distance and the sounds of children playing in the streets and other back gardens, it was possible to forget she was in a big city.
As she lay back on the comfortable chair, the sun burning down reminding her of days she’d spent like this back home in Bristol, her thoughts turned naturally to her parents. Her mother had written a very cold and distant letter a few days after Fifi got home from hospital. It was clear from the stilted tone that she hadn’t had any real change of heart. While she agreed a miscarriage was upsetting, she felt they always happened ‘for the best’. She said she thought it was churlish of Fifi to refuse the offer of a period of convalescence at home, and she didn’t know what more she could do.
The letter couldn’t have come at a worse time. Fifi was already so weepy and miserable, and all it had done was push her further into gloom and despair. There were other letters around the same time, a sweet and totally sympathetic one from Patty, a joint one from her brothers, and indeed a very warm one from her father, but her mother’s undid all the good the others might have done.
Dan had written back on Fifi’s behalf, explaining that she couldn’t write herself just then, and that their decision to stay in London was made not out of churlishness at all, but for practical reasons. He pointed out that neither of them had felt up to a long train journey or the pressures of being surrounded by other people. He said that neither of them believed losing a baby was ‘for the best’, and they both found it upsetting that anyone could view it as such.
Once Fifi had adjusted to writing with her left hand, she’d sent a brief letter saying