‘I’ll look for a flat tomorrow,’ Victor said. ‘You tell them that, son. They’ll have their rooms back.’
It was only when Jonathan had left them and Victor was flopped on the bed as Scarlett hung some of his clothes up, that he told her some more about his efforts at job-hunting.
‘I soon saw it was no use asking along the sea front. They’d put the word out.’
‘Who? Jonathan’s parents?’
‘Who else? Got on the telephone, didn’t they? Rung up all the other sea front pubs and warned them off me.’
Scarlett stared at him, shocked. It made her feel quite breathless, as if someone were standing on her chest. ‘That’s just so mean!’
‘That’s the sort of people they are. Once they got their knife into you, they never take it out. I got to say, love, I know you’re very fond of young Jonathan, and he seems like a decent boy, but just watch it, eh? Blood will out.’
‘Jonathan’s not the littlest bit like them. He doesn’t look like them and he doesn’t act like them,’ Scarlett stated with absolute certainty.
‘Yes, well…’ Victor said. ‘Let’s hope this new place is better. Seems all right. New start, eh, Scarlett love?’
‘New start,’ Scarlett agreed.
Perhaps it was all for the best. She was seeing almost as much of Jonathan and when he went away to France it would be much nicer to be living in a proper flat than at the Trafalgar.
‘Won’t it be odd, living somewhere that isn’t a pub?’ she said.
But Victor had already fallen asleep.
For a couple of days, she held onto the dream of an improving future. Victor started at the Brickmaker’s Arms and said that he thought that it would be all right when he got used to it. On Thursday morning the local paper came out. Scarlett got up early and bought one so that she and Victor could look at it over breakfast, and put circles round all the furnished flats she thought sounded nice.
‘Look at this, Flat of four rooms, three pounds, five shillings. Or this one, Furnished flat, two adults, three pounds including electricity—’
Victor let her ramble on for a while as he chewed his way through the hearty breakfast their landlady had set before them.
‘You’ll go and look at them this morning, won’t you, Dad?’ she insisted.
‘Look…er…to be honest, Scarlett love, I’m not sure we can afford any of these. It’s a bit of a shock to see how much they’re charging for flats these days. It’s a while since I looked at rents, what with all those years at the Lion. But I’ll see what I can do, all right?’
‘Well…yes…I suppose so…’ Scarlett said reluctantly. ‘I suppose anything’s better than bed and breakfast. Just as long as you find us something by this evening. It’s horrible not having a home.’
‘I know, love, I know. I’ll find us something, I promise.’
What he found was two attic rooms at the top of a terraced house that had seen better days. A smell of boiled cabbage met Scarlett as she came in the front door with its cracked stained glass panels. Victor introduced her to their prospective landlady, Mrs Thurlow, a squat figure of indeterminate age in a floral overall and a headscarf tied like a turban, who looked her up and down.
‘She looks a clean enough girl. Is she quiet?’ she asked Victor.
‘Oh, yes, very quiet,’ her father answered.
‘Only the last people up there annoyed my other tenants with the noise.’
‘We won’t be any trouble,’ Victor assured her.
‘You better not be.’
She led them up stairs with brown lino tacked to the treads and brown varnish on the woodwork.
‘Bathroom,’ she said, indicating a door on the landing with frosted glass in two of its panels, and took them up a further, narrower set of stairs to the top of the house. She opened another door, varnished brown like all the rest. ‘There you are.’
Scarlett stepped inside. She found herself in a living room with a sloping ceiling and a little window set into the gable end. There was greenish lino and a rag rug on the floor, a put-u-up sofa and fireside chair by the small gas fire, a drop-leaf table and two dining chairs.
‘Kitchenette,’ Mrs Thurlow said, indicating an alcove by the chimney-breast.
It consisted of two low cupboards side by side. Their tops were covered with checked oilcloth and on them were a double gas burner and an enamel bowl.
‘Where’s the tap?’ Scarlett asked.
‘You get water from the bathroom.’ Mrs Thurlow opened one of the cupboard doors and revealed a galvanised bucket. ‘Put your waste in here and take it back down to the bathroom.’
Before Scarlett could comment, she marched across the room and opened another door.
‘Bedroom.’
Scarlett looked in. It was much smaller, with a skylight window, a double bed pushed against the wall, a bedside table and a single wardrobe.
‘This can be yours, Scarlett, love,’ Victor said. ‘I’ll have the put-u-up.’ He put a hand on her shoulder and whispered in her ear. ‘It’ll do us for now.’
Scarlett looked at her watch, a souvenir from the golden past. She remembered the day her dad had given it to her, the day the eleven plus results had come out. They’d all been so excited in the days leading up to it, herself and her classmates at junior school. There had been a lot of boasting about what would happen if they passed the all-important exam to get to the grammar school.
‘I’m getting a bike, a blue one with twenty-four inch wheels,’ one of the girls had claimed.
‘I’m getting a real gold watch,’ her best friend had said. ‘I’ve already seen it in the window of the jewellers in Southend.’
‘I’m getting a watch too,’ Scarlett had said. ‘My dad promised.’
But when the results had arrived, she’d found that she had not got a grammar school place. She wasn’t the only one. Out of the forty-two children in her class, only eight had passed, but one of those eight was her best friend. She’d paraded round the playground glowing with success, already wearing the gold watch. Scarlett had been sick with disappointment and envy. But when she’d got back home that afternoon, her dad had been waiting for her in their living room at the back of the Red Lion.
‘I got something here for you, love,’ he’d said, handing her a slim parcel wrapped up in brown paper.
Scarlett remembered how she had brightened up a little and immediately started to tear off the paper. Her parents had watched her, smiling. There inside was a small box, and inside that a pretty lady’s watch with a red leather strap. Delight had welled up inside her.
‘But I didn’t pass,’ she’d said.
Her dad had wrapped her in his strong arms, hugging her tight. ‘It don’t matter. You tried your hardest and that’s what counts. And anyway, you’ll always be number one with your old dad.’
And she had realised that he was right. It didn’t matter so much after all about the grammar school, not so long as she had someone who believed in her.
Now she rubbed her finger lovingly over the glass. It was already nearly five o’clock. Her dad had to go to work at six. It was take this place or face another night at the guest house.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It’ll do us for now.’
When they went back to the Trafalgar the next day for the rest of their things, they found them thrown in a heap in the back yard in the rain.
CHAPTER NINE
‘COME on, lad, get that veg on those plates.’
‘Coming up, chef.’
Jonathan gritted his teeth and placed the watery boiled potatoes beside the overcooked lamb chops lying in their pools of floury gravy. He added cabbage that had been boiled to death and tired-looking carrots, then hit the button that rang a bell to summon the waiters.
‘Table six,’ he said to the elderly man who eventually arrived.
‘They’ll want more gravy than that,’ the waiter said.
Jonathan wasn’t surprised. The gravy would help disguise the tastelessness of the
vegetables. He poured some more on from the big pot that was used for all the dishes, regardless of what kind of meat it was going on, then wiped the rim of the plate carefully as he had been taught by his Uncle Michel. The waiter sighed in an exaggerated manner as he did this, and behind him the chef snorted with impatience.
‘Stop farting around, lad, and get the next lot out. I’ve got plates piling up here.’
‘Right, chef.’
He turned his attention to a beautiful Dover sole that had been grilled into submission, and gave it a dollop of grey cauliflower cheese.
This place confirmed all his prejudices about English cooking. And this was supposed to be one of the best restaurants in town. He gave the mashed potato another beating to get it to a lump-free fluffiness. That at least the chef approved of. He had tried cooking the other vegetables so that they were not reduced to mush, but had been told that people didn’t like them half raw. When he had suggested serving fish with anything other than the standard stodgy parsley sauce, he had been told that people didn’t like foreign muck. Likewise when he had asked why the chef never put wine or fresh herbs in his cooking. Sensing Jonathan’s disapproval, the chef took every opportunity to put him in his place.
‘You’re here as the apprentice, not the bleeding sous chef. I’m only letting you do the veg because I’m shorthanded. Now get on with chopping them bleeding onions!’
If he’d only been in a kitchen like this, he would never have even thought about becoming a chef. Nobody here had any love of food. Everything was put into either fat or water, ruined, smothered in gravy or parsley sauce and dumped on a plate. His Uncle Michel would weep to see the good quality ingredients coming in at the back door and the horrible travesties going out to front-of-house. It made him even more certain that he had to take up the place at L’Ortolan d’Or.
‘You—Mr bleeding Know-it-all! Two Windsor soups. Get your finger out!’
‘Chef!’
Jonathan got the plates from the warmer and ladled the brown soup from the huge pan on the stove. It smelt like school dinners. Soon, soon, he would be away from all this. Soon he would be working in a proper kitchen with people who had dedicated themselves to good food.
He tried to explain how he felt to Scarlett. They were sitting on the put-u-up in the living room of her flat.
‘Thank goodness I’m only working there lunch times. It would drive me mad to have to do the evening shift as well,’ he said.
‘It’d drive me mad being here all alone every evening,’ Scarlett said.
They were both silent for a moment or two, remembering that in just a week she would be here all alone. Jonathan put an arm round her and gathered her up to him. Scarlett leaned her head on his shoulder. He kissed the top of her head, feeling the spring of her glossy hair beneath his lips, smelling its sweet warmth.
‘You know I don’t want to leave you,’ he said.
‘Yes, yes. So you’ve said before.’
‘It’s just that…it’s like getting a place at the Slade School of Art. Or the Paris Conservatoire. They’re artists at L’Ortolan d’Or.’
‘I know. I’m glad for you. Really I am. But I still don’t want you to go.’
He put his other arm round her and held her close.
‘I’m going to miss you terribly.’
Sometimes he didn’t know how he was going to bear it. It felt as if he was about to tear a piece out of himself.
‘Me too.’
He hoped she wouldn’t cry. He hated it when she cried. It made him feel like a monster. It was bad enough just looking round the cheerless room and knowing he was leaving her here in this place. She had tried her best to make it homelike. She had cleaned it all up and hung pictures on the walls and put a pretty cloth on the table, but nothing could disguise the ugliness of the furniture and the smell of old cigarettes. He worried about how cold it was going to be in the winter. Already it was chilly. Scarlett’s father hadn’t left money for the gas meter, so they were both wearing thick jumpers to keep warm. And this was only early October. What was it going to be like by Christmas?
‘Did your dad say anything about moving to somewhere better?’
‘Not yet. He’s got to pay back the sub he got off his boss when he started. Then we’ll start looking.’
‘Yes, right,’ he said.
She caught the scepticism in his voice and flared up.
‘We will, you’ll see! This is just temporary.’
‘Of course it is,’ he agreed, and this time she seemed mollified.
When he thought of the big comfortable flat above the Trafalgar with its warm fires and its new furniture and all its modern electrical stuff, he felt guilty. Why should Scarlett have to put up with this dump? It wasn’t fair. When he thought about the reason why she was now living here, he felt even worse. He still wasn’t speaking to his father. There had been a monumental row between his parents at the end of the evening when Scarlett and her father had walked out. His mother had kept up a pretence of loyalty in front of the staff, but once they had been behind the door of the flat, all hell had been let loose. Insults had been screamed, cups thrown, ultimatums given out. But, at the end of it, because the Smiths had gone and left the rest of them in the middle of a very busy Saturday evening, somehow it had all become their fault. The reason they had left had become blurred. What had remained was their disloyalty. Loathing them had brought his parents back to an uneasy unity.
‘You’ll tell me when you do, won’t you?’ he asked. ‘You will write to me? I’ll write to you as soon as I get there, and tell you all about it.’
‘Send me a picture of the Eiffel Tower.’
‘I will, I promise. And you’ll write to me?’
‘Of course. I said I would, didn’t I?’
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
Except that it wasn’t all right. A letter would never be as good as holding her like this. Jonathan bent his head to kiss her cheek, and she moved her head so that their lips met. He wanted to do more, to find what her soft body felt like underneath that jumper, but the thought of what his father had tried to do to her held him back. It made everything soiled and dirty. So they kissed and cuddled and talked endlessly about themselves and their hopes and dreams, until it was nearly time for Mr Smith to come home.
‘See you tomorrow,’ Scarlett said as they reluctantly parted.
‘I’ll meet you from school,’ Jonathan promised.
They had to snatch every moment now. Each one was precious.
The days and then the hours galloped by. Jonathan spent his last evening with Scarlett and went back home to where his suitcases were packed and ready in the hall.
He didn’t think he would be able to sleep that night, what with the pain of parting from Scarlett and his excitement and trepidation over what was to come. Tomorrow he would be in Paris. Tomorrow night he would be sleeping at the house of a French family a couple of streets away from the restaurant. The next day he would start work. Was he going to be up to it? What exactly were they expecting him to be able to do? Was his grasp of French going to be good enough when the orders were coming in and the going got tough? It was over a year now since he had last had to use it. Most of all, was Scarlett going to be all right? He hated thinking of her alone each evening in those miserable rooms. If only he could take her with him.
He lay awake worrying for what seemed like hours, only to be surprised when his mother came in to wake him up.
‘Come on, Jonny. We don’t want to miss the train. I’ve got the breakfast on.’
This was it. Today was the day. Once up, he found that he was ravenously hungry, and wolfed down the fry-up his mother placed in front of him. Uncharacteristically, she fussed round him.
‘Have you packed your washing things?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘You’ve got your passport in your inside jacket pocket?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
; ‘And your tickets and your money? You’ve got the francs all right?’
‘Yes! For heaven’s sake, Mum. I did it all last night.’
‘I know you said you did, but all you really wanted to do was to get out and see your friends.’
‘I had to say goodbye, didn’t I?’
He’d been deliberately vague about exactly who he was saying goodbye to.
‘And you’re sure you know which platform the Paris train goes from at Dunkirk? And what to do when you get to Paris?’
‘Yes! I’m not stupid, you know. I can find my own way about.’
‘But it’s a foreign country. They do things different there.’
Jonathan sighed. Even though her brother had married a Frenchwoman, his mother had never really come to accept that normal life was lived over the Channel. It might just as well be the far side of the moon, inhabited by little green men.
His father came in.
‘All ready, son?’
‘Yup.’
‘Big day, then. Start of your new life.’
‘Yup.’
He gulped down the rest of his tea and went out of the room. If his father thought he was going to stage a big reconciliation, he was mistaken. He fiddled around checking the tickets and counting the francs until it was time to go. He wished he was doing the whole journey by himself, but his mother had insisted on going up to London with him and seeing him onto the boat train at Victoria.
His mother came in.
‘Jonny, the taxi’s here. Are you ready?’
‘I’ve been ready for ages.’
‘What are you doing in here, then? Come and say goodbye to your father. And Jonny—’ she lowered her voice ‘—say it properly, eh? We’ve had enough sulking round here.’
Sulking? Was that what she called it? They were so unfair, the pair of them.
With difficulty, Jonathan shook his father’s hand and spoke to him in something approaching a polite tone.
‘Work hard, son. It’s a wonderful opportunity you’ve got. Good of Michel to arrange it for you.’
Bye Bye Love Page 9