Bye Bye Love

He hung about in the staff kitchen until opening time to avoid seeing his parents, then spent a miserable hour in the flat, sitting at the window and staring out unseeing across the water. What was he going to do? The dilemma went round and round in his head. The last thing he wanted to do was to hurt Scarlett. The last thing he wanted to do was to leave her. But—but this opportunity was just too good to miss. If he turned it down, it would never come again. The day had started so well, too. They had been so happy, larking around on the beach and watching the carnival. And now this. Scarlett was locked in her room, probably crying, and he was here feeling like a complete monster, trying to find a way through.

He held his head in his hands, digging his fingers into his scalp. This was all so confusing. He’d known roughly where his life was going and suddenly Scarlett had come along and everything had been turned upside down. If this was what they called love, then it wasn’t at all like all the songs and stuff. He still hadn’t worked it out when seven o’clock rolled round and he had to go downstairs.

Both bars were heaving. Men were three deep trying to get served and every seat and practically all the standing room was taken. The air was already thick with cigarette smoke and the noise was tremendous.

‘There you are, son,’ his father boomed above the racket. ‘’Bout time too. Get your arse in gear and clear those tables.’

‘You said seven,’ Jonathan shouted back at him, and dived through the melée to grab the glasses from the nearest table.

His hands full, he scurried along the dank passage leading to the toilets and into the small storeroom behind the bar area that had been fitted with a sink and draining board for just such busy times as this. Scarlett was already there, drying a trayful of pint jugs. She stiffened as he came in, but didn’t turn round.

‘Scarlett,’ he began, placing the dirty glasses in the sink, ‘please try and see it my way—’

‘Why should I?’ she retorted. ‘You don’t see it my way. You don’t care that I’m going to be left here all alone.’

‘Of course I do. I don’t want—’

Scarlett thrust the finished tray at him.

‘You’d best take these through. I’m not allowed.’

Jonathan sighed and carted the jugs into the bar.

It was frantic in the serving area. Irma and a temporary barmaid were in the lounge bar, Mr Smith and another temporary in the public bar area and his parents were moving between the two, keeping a watchful eye on the whole pub and serving more than the other four put together.

‘Seventeen and eightpence, not tuppence,’ he heard his father correct Mr Smith, as he pulled a pint for the round he was serving. His dad was good at that, adding up someone else’s round and his own at the same time and getting both of them right. Bar staff found it unnerving, but it made them concentrate harder on being accurate, even when it was as busy as this. Jonathan unloaded the jugs and dived under the flap to collect some more.

The evening rolled on with no slackening of the pace. Jonathan collected glasses, emptied ashtrays and fetched supplies up from the cellar. Every time he took empties in to Scarlett he tried to reason with her, but somehow they never got further than a few sentences. Either one of the barmaids would come to fetch a clean trayful, or his mother or father would shout for him to come and do something. Once when he came through the passageway he ran into Scarlett’s father. He was leaning against the wall swigging from a flat quarter bottle of Scotch. When he saw Jonathan he hastily screwed the top on and thrust it in his pocket.

‘I bought it myself,’ he said.

‘Yes, of course,’ Jonathan replied, but a lifetime of listening to his parents discussing the shortcomings of bar staff made him wonder. Maybe Mr Smith had bought the original bottle from an off-licence. They didn’t sell them at the pub, after all. But it would be easy enough to refill it from the optics. A squirt here and a squirt there wouldn’t be missed in the volume they sold on a busy day but, if his parents did find out, there would be hell to pay. It was yet another thing to worry about.

He took the latest lot of empties through to Scarlett and, as he did so, the sound of angry voices could be heard above the general level of noise in the public bar. Then there was a crash and howls of rage.

‘Fight,’ Jonathan said, standing in the doorway through to the bar and craning his neck to see.

Unable to resist the drama, Scarlett came to his side, wiping her hands on her apron. Together they watched as Jonathan’s father waded in and separated the combatants. Jonathan could feel the warmth of Scarlett’s arm against his, could hear the intake of her breath. As his father threw the troublemakers out into the street, he put his arm round Scarlett’s shoulders and pulled her away from the doorway so that they couldn’t be seen from the bar. He gathered her resisting body to him and spoke into her dark hair.

‘I’m sorry, Scarlett. I don’t want to leave you, really I don’t—’

Her fists were clenched against his chest. ‘I couldn’t bear it here without you.’

He felt as if he were being physically torn apart. ‘I’ve got to do it, can’t you see? It’s my whole future. When I’m a trained chef, I shall open my own restaurant. We could run it together, you and me. It’d be terrific.’

‘But that’s years and years away,’ Scarlett protested.

Inspiration struck him.

‘You could come and join me, once you’ve left school. I could find you a job. We could both live in Paris. It’d be wonderful, Scarlett. Just think, both of us in Paris together!’

The stiffness went out of her and she looked up at him, her great dark eyes drowned in tears.

‘Do you think we could?’

‘Of course.’

Right at that moment he could do anything—anything at all. He could conquer the world. He bent his head and did what he had been longing to do almost from that first day she’d burst into his life. He kissed her sweet lips.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SCARLETT loathed Jonathan’s father almost as much as she loathed his mother. He was a big, heavy-set man with a massive balding head and a belligerent manner, very different from her own gentle dad. But worse than that, there was something about the way he looked at her that she hated.

It was Marlene who warned her.

‘Don’t let the Guv’nor get you in a tight place by yourself. He don’t know how to keep his hands to himself. And if the Missus catches him at it, it’ll be you what gets it in the neck. I seen it happen lots of times. Me, I make sure there’s always someone else around.’

‘Right. Thanks,’ Scarlett said.

It was yet another thing to worry about, along with her dad’s health, starting at her new school and, hanging over it all, Jonathan’s departure to Paris in the autumn. Top of the list at the moment was buying her new school uniform.

‘But you got a school uniform,’ her father said when she raised the subject one morning.

‘I’ve got one for my old school. It’s no use for the new one, it’s the wrong colour,’ Scarlett explained, handing him his cup of tea to drink in bed and locating his matches. Surely he must understand that? ‘It’s only the white shirts that are the same, and anyway the ones I had last year are too tight.’

It was a pity about the shirts. They were perfectly all right for another year, but they no longer did up over her swelling breasts. What she needed as well was a bra, but she couldn’t possibly tell him that. The yearning for her mother came over her yet again. It would have been so nice to go shopping for bras with her mum.

‘I need a skirt and a jumper and a tie and a mac and a beastly beret,’ she said, blinking back the threatening tears.

‘Oh, dear. That’s going to add up to a pretty penny, isn’t it?’

‘But I’ve got to have them, Dad. I can’t go to school without the uniform.’

It was going to be horrible enough starting somewhere where she didn’t know anyone at all and everyone else had their own groups of friends. At her last school she had known everyone in her own year and quite a few of the older and younger girls.

Victor felt in the pockets of the trousers he had hung over the bedhead. He produced some grubby notes and a handful of silver.

‘See how far that goes, love, and if it ain’t enough, I’ll see if I can get a sub off the Guv’nor.’

As he handed her the money, she caught a whiff of alcohol on his breath. It wasn’t the first time.

‘You been drinking, Dad?’

He avoided her eyes. ‘No, no. I had one or two last night, that’s all. Now, off you go and see what you can buy, there’s a good girl.’

‘You could come with me,’ she said. ‘It’s your day off today, isn’t it?’

Victor rubbed the back of his neck.