Bye Bye Love (22 page)

‘You’ll have to go on the dole, like my mum did,’ Brenda said. ‘It ain’t much, but you won’t starve. But it won’t come to that. Come on, cheer up. He’ll be in here with a big grin and a bunch of flowers and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ Scarlett said.

By the time she was due to leave hospital the following Friday she was rested and recovered physically, but in a state of emotional turmoil. Ricky was still away. Nobody had heard from him—not his parents, nor his friends, nor his workplace. Victor organised himself enough to take the long bus ride out to the hospital and confirmed that Ricky had not been home and hadn’t so much as written a note of explanation.

‘Do you want to come back to our house, just until Ricky gets back?’ Mrs Harrington asked when she came to meet Scarlett and take her home.

‘No, thank you. I want to be there when he arrives,’ Scarlett said. What she didn’t admit was that she couldn’t possibly leave her father any longer. He had been ten days on his own now. She doubted if he’d had a proper meal in all that time.

She sat in the back seat of the taxi with Joanne trampling her lap and wound round her neck while Nana held her new grandson. It was wonderful to be with Joanne again. She had missed her terribly in hospital. But everything else about her situation filled her with trepidation. Ricky had to come home. He had to.

At the door of the flat she hesitated. She couldn’t possibly invite Ricky’s mother in. God knew what sort of a mess the place was in. She leaned forward and made herself kiss her mother-in-law on the cheek.

‘Thanks ever so much for all your help, Nana. I don’t know what I would of done without you.’

Which was perfectly true.

It took a bit more before Mrs Harrington took the hint, but in the end she put Scarlett’s case inside the door and handed her the baby.

‘You know where I am if you need me,’ she said.

Scarlett could tell from her voice that she had taken offence, but there was no helping that. She just couldn’t let her in.

‘Thanks,’ she said again.

What with having a new baby, Ricky disappearing, not knowing how her father was and now her mother-in-law looking hurt and upset, Scarlett felt as if her head would burst. It was all too much. But she did have to stay on the right side of Ricky’s mum.

Joanne was already toddling into the hall. Scarlett had a brainwave.

‘Come here, darling. Say goodbye to Nana.’

For once, Joanne responded and came back to her. Scarlett squatted with the baby still in one arm and put the other round Joanne.

‘Thank Nana for all she’s done, looking after you.’

The little girl looked up at her grandmother. ‘Nannan,’ she said obligingly.

Mrs Harrington softened.

‘It’s been lovely having you, darling. A real pleasure.’ She looked at Scarlett. ‘Ricky was lovely at this age.’

What a pity he had changed so much.

The thought was so strong that Scarlett wasn’t sure whether she had said it out loud or not. She glanced at Mrs Harrington. She was still smiling at Joanne, who was now hanging onto Scarlett’s coat like grim death.

‘I’m sure he must have been,’ she managed to say.

She finally closed the door on her mother-in-law and carried baby Simon into the living room. The place reeked of stale drink and ashtrays. Dirty plates, cups and glasses stood on the floor and furniture, some of the cups with mould growing in them, all with fag-ends piled up on them. An old pair of shoes and a dirty shirt had been left in the middle of the floor along with an untidy pile of newspapers.

For a long moment, Scarlett just stood and stared at it all. It was all so disgusting. Then Joanne went toddling over to the nearest cup and started investigating it. Scarlett clicked into action, snatching it out of her hand.

‘No, darling. Dirty.’

Joanne squawked in protest.

‘We’d better get all this mess cleared up. No one else is going to do it,’ Scarlett told her.

She laid the baby down in the pram, opened the windows to let some fresh air in and went to see if her father was still in his room. He wasn’t, though the room was even worse than the living room.

‘Well, at least he’s gone to work. That’s one good thing,’ Scarlett said.

She was only halfway through setting things to rights when Simon woke up hungry. Scarlett put Joanne in the playpen, where she threw a tantrum, and sat down on the newly swept sofa to feed the baby. Weariness flooded over her.

‘Not much of a start for you, is it, baby?’ she said to Simon, as he champed greedily at her breast. ‘You’ve got a home that stinks worse than a pub on a Sunday morning and a dad who’s done a bunk. I wonder if he’s ever coming home?’

T
WO
weeks after she returned home with Simon, Scarlett was still waiting for Ricky to appear. And the rent was overdue. There was only one thing for it—she would have to swallow her pride and borrow it from Ricky’s parents.

‘Just until he comes back,’ she explained to them.

If she had been expecting trouble, she was pleasantly surprised. Mr Harrington immediately reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet and handed her two five pound notes.

‘Get y’self up-to-date. You never ought to get behindhand with your rent. That’s your roof over your head, that is,’ he told her. ‘We don’t want Richard to come back and find he hasn’t got a home any more.’

‘I know,’ Scarlett said dutifully. ‘That’s why I was so worried about it.’

‘I don’t know what Richard’s playing at, going off like this. It’s not what he’s been brought up to do, I can tell you that.’

It was the longest speech Scarlett had ever heard him make.

Mrs Harrington was practically in tears. ‘I don’t know what’s happened. I’m sure he’s not staying away on purpose. He must be hurt or lost his memory or something. I’m going out of my mind with worry.’

Another two weeks further on, and Scarlett had lost hope.

‘If he was coming back, he’d be here by now,’ she told her father.

‘We’re better off without him,’ Victor said. ‘You’re much too good for him, love.’

‘We’re not better off, that’s the point,’ Scarlett said. ‘All I’ve got is my family allowance for Simon. We’re just about managing with the Harringtons paying the rent, but I can’t go on asking them for money.’

She bit back the obvious, which was that if Victor had a decent job and didn’t spend what little he earned on drink, they wouldn’t be in this fix.

‘I haven’t paid the HP on the fridge for four weeks now. They’re sending me nasty letters,’ she added. ‘It took me ages to persuade Ricky we needed one, and now I can’t afford to keep the payments up. You know what that means—they’ll come and take it away.’

As if to underline what she was saying, the radio went dead.

‘That’s the electric run out again. Have you got a shilling?’ Scarlett asked.

Victor went through a pantomime of feeling in all his pockets. ‘Sorry, love. I did have some. I don’t know where it went.’

Scarlett sighed. ‘Dad, we both know perfectly well where it went.’

She looked in her purse and found another shilling, but she needed that for food. Already their diet was down to absolute basics. She hadn’t bought any meat for a fortnight.

‘I suppose there’s not much point in having a fridge if we can’t afford to run one.’ She sighed. ‘At least then we needn’t use the electric during the day, though it’d mean not having the radio on. I do love my radio.’

Victor made a vague noise of agreement and started rolling himself a very slim cigarette, as if trying to prove that he was making economies as well.

‘And then there’s the coal,’ she said, following her own train of thought. ‘We’ll have to buy some more soon, the evenings are already beginning to draw in. It’s not like when it was just us. I’ve got to keep the children warm.’

‘Oh, yes, you got to keep them warm,’ Victor echoed.

It was like talking to herself.

‘What do you think, Dad?’ she asked. ‘What can we do? We’re on our uppers. I’m going to have to go on the dole.’

That did shock him. In the days when they had the Red Lion, they had despised people who took from the state when there were plenty of jobs to be had.

‘You can’t do that, Scarlett. Only scroungers go on the dole.’

‘We’ve got to eat and we’ve got to pay the rent. I’ve got the kids to look after; I can’t go back to work. Even if I did, I’d only earn half of what Ricky brought in, so that wouldn’t be any use. It’s not fair, the way they pay men more than us.’

‘Oh, well, it’s women’s work, ain’t it?’ Victor pointed out.

‘If we can’t pay the rent, we’ll have to move. It’ll be back to somewhere like the last place,’ Scarlett said.

Voicing it out loud made it seem one step nearer. A feeling of doom crept over Scarlett. This flat had no bathroom or hot water and only an outside toilet, but it was a hundred times better than those two rooms in the attic. How could she possibly cope with nappies in a place like that?

‘Perhaps Ricky’s folks’ll cough up,’ was all Victor could suggest.

But, before she could bring herself to ask them, the Harringtons came to see her. They made sure it was an evening when Victor was at work. Scarlett was puzzled. They never visited in the evenings. She sat them down in the living room and made tea, thankful that she did have both gas and electricity working at the moment, having taken some money off her father and hidden it from him.

Both Harringtons sat on the edge of the sofa, as if afraid it might contaminate them if they relaxed into it. Ricky was not mentioned. His mother couldn’t even speak his name without bursting into tears. She gave her husband a look.

‘Go on, George.’

Mr Harrington cleared his throat. ‘We…er…we came to ask you something…’

‘Just a temporary arrangement. Until…until…’ Mrs Harrington said, and stopped, a catch in her voice.

‘Until things get back to normal,’ her husband explained.

‘An arrangement about what?’ Scarlett asked. She had a bad feeling about this already.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ Mr Harrington said. ‘We’d like to, but we’re not made of money, see? And now it’s over five weeks and it looks like…like…’

‘He’s not coming back,’ Scarlett filled in.

Mrs Harrington got out her handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

‘Oh, don’t say that. He will come back, I know he will.’

Mr Harrington patted her knee awkwardly.

‘Well, until then, until he does, we’ve got to decide what to do about you and the kiddies and this flat. Like I said, we can’t afford to go on paying the rent for ever, so we thought the best thing is for you to move in with us.’

Scarlett thought about their tight little house, where there was a place for everything and everything was in its place and polished to within an inch of its life, where there were doilies and table napkin rings and vases of plastic flowers, where jokes were frowned upon and fun disapproved of and the very air tasted dead. She knew her soul would shrivel up and die there.

‘We’ve got two spare bedrooms, one for you and one for the kiddies,’ Mrs Harrington put in. ‘It’s not what I want, but duty comes first. Those kiddies are my grandchildren, and we’ve got to see they’re brought up right.’

Put like that, it all sounded very sensible and far too good an offer to refuse.

‘I see,’ Scarlett said miserably. How could she refuse a decent home for her children?

‘Of course, certain standards will have to be kept. My standards. Under our roof, you’ll have to do things our way.’

Scarlett said nothing. She felt like a mouse looking into a trap. Then something occurred to her.

‘What about my dad? This is his home as well.’

Mrs Harrington’s mouth pursed up until she looked as if she had sucked a lemon.

Mr Harrington looked grim. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t got room for him. He’ll have to make his own arrangements,’ he stated.

Scarlett felt a huge relief. This was her let-out.

‘Then I can’t come. My dad needs me. I’m all he’s got.’

The Harringtons argued for quite some while, but there was no room for compromise. Scarlett wouldn’t move without Victor and the Harringtons refused to have him in their house. They got up and stalked out of the door.

‘Don’t say we didn’t try to help,’ Mr Harrington said.

Mrs Harrington paused on the step and fixed Scarlett with a cold stare. ‘Those kiddies are my grandchildren. If they’re not properly cared for, I’m going to the authorities.’

Her words sent an icy fear through Scarlett. But she stood her ground and faced her mother-in-law down.

‘I can look after my own children, don’t you worry.’

‘We’ll be back and make sure you do,’ Mrs Harrington retorted.

Scarlett slammed the door on them and marched back into the living room, where her legs suddenly went weak and she had to collapse onto the sofa.

‘How dare they? How dare they?’ she said out loud.

One thing was for sure—she now had to take action.

The next morning, she loaded both babies into the big pram and walked into Southend. After a long wait in a dreary building, surrounded by poor and depressed-looking people, she was called up for an interview. The hatchet-faced woman at the desk took her details. The problem was that Scarlett didn’t fall into any category. She wasn’t a widow who could receive a pension, she wasn’t a divorcée with a maintenance agreement. She was a deserted wife with no way of proving she was alone and no idea where her husband had got to. When she unwisely revealed that her father was living with her, the situation got worse. As he was working and there was nothing physically wrong with him, he was deemed able to support her. Scarlett pointed out how small his wages were. The woman suggested that he got a better job.

‘He can’t get a better job. He’s only hanging onto this one by the skin of his teeth,’ Scarlett said. ‘I’m not leaving here till you sort something out. I’ve got two babies to feed and keep warm. I don’t care about myself, but I need something to keep them until their father comes back.’

Simon obligingly woke up and started crying. Scarlett threatened to breast-feed him then and there. The woman snorted with disgust and said that she supposed something could be done under some regulation or other. Eventually, Scarlett left with an emergency payment and the promise of an allowance book in the post. The weekly amount was horribly small, but it was better than nothing. Scarlett emerged into the open air in triumph. She had kept her little family together.

The next step in her campaign was to get her hands on Victor’s money. On Friday she pushed the pram all along the London Road to The Oaks to collect his wages herself.

‘I’m going to do this every week now. Don’t give them to him and don’t let him have any subs out of it,’ she told the landlady.

She then hid the money at the back of the cleaning cupboard and gave her father a small amount each day.

‘I can’t live on that,’ Victor protested.

‘You’re not living on it. You’re living here—food, gas, electric and everything. This is just pocket money and it’s a darned sight more than I get,’ Scarlett told him.

‘But it’s not enough—I got expenses.’

‘Yes, and we all know what they are, don’t we? Fags and booze. You’re killing yourself, Dad. It’ll do you the world of good to cut down.’

‘Call yourself my daughter? You’re heartless!’ Victor accused.

But Scarlett stuck to her plan.

Over the next few weeks, it became clear that more had to be done. The men from the hire purchase company came and took the fridge away. Neighbours complained to her that Victor was forever trying to borrow money off them. Then the television broke down and Scarlett couldn’t afford to have it repaired.

‘Stupid thing,’ she said, scowling at it as it sat lifeless in the corner of the room.

The television had stopped her from feeling so lonely in the evenings. It was even better than the radio, though all the advertisements for things she couldn’t afford did make her feel even poorer. Then she remembered Brian, the Riptide who had bought it for them. She found four pence for the phone, went up to the call box on the main road and phoned the repair shop where he worked. He sounded surprised to hear from her, but promised to come round one evening and have a look at the TV for her. He arrived two days later.

‘You not heard from Ricky, then?’ he asked.

‘No, have you?’

‘Not a word. Bastard, walking out like that. We got another singer but he’s not as good. We’re just The Riptides now. We’re all equal now we ain’t got Ricky acting the star.’

Scarlett wished it was that easy to replace a husband. She made Brian some tea while he got the back off the TV and poked around inside it. He spouted a lot of technical terms that Scarlett didn’t understand, put the back on again and switched it on. It lit up.

‘Hooray!’ Scarlett said. She felt cheerful for the first time in weeks.

The screen was still fuzzy, but Brian fiddled with some of the controls and at last a clear picture appeared.

‘That’s wonderful. Thanks ever so much, Brian.’

Brian gave her a funny look. ‘Well, you said you wanted a favour.’

‘I know. Like I said, Ricky left us high and dry. I couldn’t afford to get it repaired. I hope you don’t mind me asking like this.’

It was embarrassing, having to admit to her poverty, especially to Brian. She never had liked him much.

‘I don’t mind. Not when one good turn deserves another.’ He leered at her.

‘What?’ said Scarlett.

Brian took a step nearer. ‘I always did fancy you, Scarlett, but Ricky always got to all the best birds first. But he’s gone now, and I bet you’re missing a bit of the other, ain’t you?’

Scarlett realised what he was on about. ‘No,’ she lied, stepping backwards.

Brian made a lunge at her, grabbed her in his arms and tried to kiss her.

Scarlett twisted her head away. ‘Get off! Get your filthy hands off me and get out!’

Brian just laughed. ‘Oh, come on—you know you want it. Ricky always said how hot you was. Begging for it, he said.’

He forced her backwards so that they fell onto the sofa.

‘Come on, Scarlett—a favour for a favour.’

Scarlett struggled and kicked and scratched.

Brian laughed. ‘Ricky said you was a wildcat. You love it really, don’t you?’

‘I do not. Get off!’

Scarlett’s flailing hand touched the fire-irons on the hearth. Her fingers closed round the first handle, she wrenched it away from the stand and brought what turned out to be the shovel down hard on Brian’s head.

‘Bloody hell! You bitch!’

As he put his hand to his head, he shifted enough for Scarlett to wriggle from underneath him. Using two hands now, she swung the shovel at him again, this time aiming between his legs. Brian saw the blow coming, squawked in horror and jumped up. Blood was running down his neck from the cut on his head.