Ricky stepped into the room. He caught sight of Scarlett and Victor and stopped dead.
‘Bloody hell. What are you doing here?’
‘Ricky! Language!’ his mother exclaimed.
‘We got some sorting out to do here, son,’ his father said. He gave Scarlett a hard look. ‘This girl—’
Victor interrupted. ‘You got my Scarlett in the family way, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it,’ he said loudly.
‘I…what…you’re never…’ Ricky stuttered.
He looked round at all the eyes fixed on him. For one terrible moment, Scarlett thought he was going to deny all knowledge.
‘Is it yours, son?’ his father asked heavily.
‘Mine?’ Ricky shifted his shoulders. Then, to Scarlett’s amazement, a cocky grin appeared on his face. ‘Of course it is. Nothing wrong with the old equipment, is there, babe?’
All three adults looked shocked.
‘You little—’ Victor growled.
Scarlett put a hand on his arm, afraid that he might get physical.
‘It’s all right, Dad.’
‘No, it ain’t all right—’
‘There’s no need for that sort of talk, son,’ Mr Harrington told him.
Ricky rolled his eyes. ‘Blimey, I only—’
‘You’ll have to get married, of course,’ Mrs Harrington stated.
‘Married?’ Ricky looked horrified. ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘You’ve admitted to it. You’re the one what indulged in immoral behaviour. Now you got to bear the consequences, and give this child a name,’ his father said.
‘Though everyone will know. A seven month baby. I don’t know how I’m going to hold my head up. Nothing like this has ever happened in my family before,’ his mother ranted.
‘Young people today. Got no shame. Wouldn’t have happened in my day,’ his father stated.
‘Girls in our day knew how to behave,’ Mrs Harrington agreed, glaring at Scarlett.
Victor flared up at this. ‘My Scarlett’s a good girl. She got led astray by your son.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Ricky exploded, producing gasps and cries of shock all round. ‘I tell you something, it’ll be worth it just to get away from here. Nag, nag, nag all day long. Don’t do this, don’t say that. Take your shoes off, chew your food proper, watch your tongue. I’ve had enough of it, you hear? Scarlett and me’ll get a place and do what we want, won’t we, babe? All night and all day, and no one to tell us we can’t.’
Scarlett hardly heard the furore that this produced. She sat staring at the flames as they began to lick round the coals. Married. She was going to be married to Ricky. A huge dark weight seemed to settle on her, filling her with dread. She knew it would be the wrong thing to do. Ricky was not the man for her. The only person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with was Jonathan. But inside her was Ricky’s baby.
There was no way out.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE wedding was quick and very unromantic. Ricky’s mother took charge and insisted that they married in church.
‘I don’t hold with them registry office things,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what they say, I don’t think you’re properly married at them places. It’s bad enough having to rush things like this.’
She did relent a little in her attitude to Scarlett when she realised that her daughter-in-law to be didn’t have a mother to guide her.
‘All the same, you should of known better,’ she kept saying.
That seemed to be everyone’s opinion. Ricky didn’t come in for much blame at all. It was all Scarlett’s fault for giving in to him. Some joker at work made up a new nickname for her—the Scarlett Woman. She heard it whispered wherever she went.
She hardly slept the night before her wedding. She harboured wild thoughts of running off and finding a ship to take her to Malaya and Jonathan. But imagining telling him that she was carrying someone else’s baby put paid to that. She was caught up in what everyone else had decided was the right thing to do, and the only alternative was to have the baby all by herself, which still wouldn’t bring back the old days with Jonathan. In the end she did what she had known she was going to do all along. She got up and put on the dress she had borrowed from one of the girls at work.
Mrs Harrington had been scandalised that she would be wearing white when she wasn’t a virgin.
‘You’re the one that wants to keep up appearances,’ Scarlett told her.
So here she was, wearing a nylon satin dress that didn’t really fit her. The fashion for tight bodices and tiny waists was not kind to the pregnant woman. The girl she had borrowed the dress from was much fatter than her, so though it went round her expanding belly all right, the rest of it was far too large. She sighed and plonked the headdress and veil on her pinned-up hair. It hid the worst of it.
Brenda arrived. She was also dressed in borrowed finery, a lemon-yellow bridesmaid’s dress from the same source as Scarlett’s.
‘You all right?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘For Gawd’s sake! He’s a bit of all right, your Ricky, and he ain’t made any fuss about getting married, has he?’
‘Why should he? It’s his baby too, you know.’
‘Yeah, but it don’t always follow that they admit it. I bet there’s a lot of girls round this town ready to step into your shoes right now.’
‘They can have him. It’s Jonathan I want.’
‘You should of thought of that before you let Ricky put you up the duff,’ Brenda told her.
Which was so true that Scarlett was silenced.
Victor, Scarlett and Brenda took a taxi to the church. Victor was dressed once more in his suit and buoyed up with a bottle of whisky in his pocket. By the time they arrived, it was Scarlett who had to support him up the aisle.
A disapproving vicar intoned the service in a bored voice. Scarlett and Ricky repeated the vows, the register was signed, and there they were, man and wife. They all went back to the Harringtons’ for a buffet lunch, where Victor drank most of the beer and went out for more whisky and Ricky’s family looked more and more appalled at the whole set-up. The happy couple escaped as soon as they could for a one night honeymoon in Clacton, where Scarlett spent most of the time in tears. She still hadn’t told Jonathan.
Jonathan had a bad feeling about the letter the moment it arrived. It had been nearly a month since Scarlett’s last one, and that had been very brief, telling him that everything was fine at home and if he meant was her father a problem, he was quite all right, thank you very much. Jonathan had been regretting asking about him ever since Judy had advised him to try. After all, what did Judy know? She was very nice and kind, but she had never met Scarlett or her father. She couldn’t understand how loyal Scarlett was to him. He stood holding the latest letter, turning it over and over in his hands. Good news or bad, he knew it was best to get it over with, but he needed somewhere quiet to read it.
‘Another hot one from the girlfriend?’ someone in the hut asked.
‘Yeah. Not for your eyes, mate,’ Jonathan said.
He thrust it into his pocket, where it burned all morning long.
It wasn’t until the lunches had been served and cleared away that he had ten minutes to himself. He sat on a packing crate under the palms behind the kitchen and tore it open. The first thing he noticed was a new address in Westcliff, then that the letter itself was very short.
My dearest Jonathan,
I’m sorry I haven’t written for so long. An awful lot has happened these last few weeks and I didn’t know how to tell you.
As you can see from the top, I’ve moved. It’s a nice flat on the ground floor with two bedrooms and a proper kitchen and everything. Well, there isn’t a bathroom but there’s a toilet out the back that no one uses but us and we can wash in the kitchen. It’s really lovely having my own sink with my own tap and not having to go downstairs for water all the time like at the last place. We have to boil a kett
le for hot water but that’s not a problem. I’ve got a real cooker as well, with an oven and everything. The kitchen’s very poky, you can hardly turn round in it, but it is a real kitchen, not just a corner with a gas ring and a bowl like I had before.
I had to clean the whole flat right through when we moved in. You should have seen the mess! The last people kept dogs there and it was all covered with hairs and muddy paw-prints and worse. The smell! I don’t know how people can live like that. We got the first week for free because of it though so it was worth the effort. Brenda was a real angel and came and helped me.
Jonathan, I don’t know how to tell you this. I’ve been putting it off and putting it off and now I’ve got to tell you because it’s not right not to. The reason why I’ve moved is because I got married last week. Jonathan, I’m so sorry. It all happened so quickly. I always thought that when you came back, well, you and me, but it’s too late now. I know this is going to be a terrible shock for you. I hope you won’t hate me because I still care a lot for you and it’s making me really upset to think of you reading this. I’ve tried lots of times to make this letter not so bad, but I don’t know what else to say, only that I’m sorry and please don’t hate me.
Love,
Scarlett
At first Jonathan was so shocked he just stared at the words on the page.
‘No,’ he said out loud. ‘No. You can’t do this to me.’
He read the whole thing through again slowly in the vain hope that he might have misunderstood. But no, there it was. Scarlett had got married. A terrible physical pain tore at his guts. This could not be happening to him. Not his Scarlett. He dug his knuckles into his eyes, trying to keep the tears at bay.
How could she do this? How long had it all been going on? Who was this man who had taken her away from him?
He thought of all the opportunities he had had here—the nurses, the Malay girls, the Chinese girls. He had turned them all down because he knew Scarlett was waiting for him at home. Or at least, he had thought she was waiting for him at home. Clearly she hadn’t. But to string him along like this! All the time pretending everything was all right, then to tell him she was married. He felt utterly betrayed.
A murderous rage came to his rescue. He couldn’t stay where he was a moment longer. Not caring what the consequences might be, he walked out of the compound through the hole in the wire at the back and went and got very drunk at a bar.
At some point in the evening he fell into the arms of a Malay girl who took him back to her village. After that he remembered nothing until he was finally arrested by the military police the next day and put on a charge. He didn’t care. Nothing mattered, now that Scarlett was no longer waiting for him back home. The future was blank.
His senior officer read him a lecture on ruining his unblemished record. Jonathan couldn’t feel anything much about it. It was his own sense of responsibility to the patients he was feeding that kept him doing his job properly. The routine of the kitchen held him together and made a pattern to each day.
He vented his feelings in a blistering letter to Scarlett that ran into several pages. He felt slightly better having written it, as if an abscess had been lanced. For days afterwards he wavered between regretting having sent it and being pleased that Scarlett should be made to feel bad about what she had done. Either way, the deed was done. He did not expect a reply.
It was Judy who put the pieces together again. At first she was sympathetic, then she became stern.
‘You’re drinking far too much,’ she told him after a going-away party.
‘Everyone drinks at parties,’ he said.
‘Not as much as you do. You’re not just drinking to be sociable like the rest of us. You’re drinking to forget.’
‘So? It works.’
‘And how do you feel this morning?’
‘All right.’
He hurt so much all the time that a headache was almost a welcome distraction.
‘Liar. You’ve got a huge hangover. I can tell. And do you remember what you got up to last night?’
Jonathan didn’t answer. He could recall the first part of the evening, but the rest was a blur. He had some unexplained cuts and bruises but he had woken up in the right bed.
‘You got very aggressive, you challenged Mike to a fight and then you fell over a table and passed out. The lads had to carry you home. You’d better thank them, because if it weren’t for them you’d be up on another charge.’
‘Oh.’
He hadn’t realised he had been quite that bad.
Judy put a hand on his arm. ‘I seem to remember you saying that your Scarlett’s father was a drunk, that he didn’t look after her properly.’
‘Yes.’
Just the sound of her name was like a kick in the stomach.
‘Do you want to end up like him?’
‘I’m not in the least like him!’
‘Maybe not yet, but this is how it starts.’
Jonathan refused to believe her. Only later did he turn it over in his mind and admit that drinking was no way out. More than that, the last person he wanted to be like was Victor Smith. He went on the wagon. At least then he felt he was in control of himself, if not of his life.
When he was just getting over the first shock, he met Agatha at a wedding. The daughter of a Dutch father and a Chinese mother, she was small and exquisite, with pale gold skin, Chinese features and startling blue eyes. In a classic rebound, Jonathan fell willingly under her spell. She was charming and funny and when she was with him she gave him her absolute attention, making him feel as if he was the only person in the room that mattered.
She invited him to her home to meet her family. Jonathan arrived in a borrowed Jeep to find that she lived in a vast bungalow surrounded by an exotic garden and run by what seemed like an army of servants. He was taken aback. He knew that Mr Van der Post ran a successful company exporting Malay silk and artwork and importing western electrical goods. What he hadn’t realised was just how well off the family was.
A uniformed houseboy conducted him to a broad veranda at the back furnished with comfortable cane chairs and hammocks and hung with baskets of orchids.
‘Jonathan!’ Agatha slid elegantly out of the hammock she was lying in and came towards him with both hands outstretched. ‘Come and meet my parents.’
He was introduced to a tall blond man with skin turned brick-red by years of tropical sunshine. He grasped Jonathan’s hand and studied him closely as he shook it. Jonathan looked steadily back at him. He wasn’t going to be intimidated by this man. Mr Van der Post was evidently satisfied with what he saw, and in turn introduced his wife. Mrs Van der Post was a surprise. Jonathan had expected her to be in traditional Chinese clothing with her hair in a bun, but instead found himself looking at a woman wearing a western hairstyle and the latest Paris fashions.
‘How do you do?’ she said, in the same prettily accented English as her daughter. ‘Agatha has told us much about you.’
Two younger sisters, not as lovely as Agatha, came forward to say hello. The only son of the family was away at school.
Lunch was served at a spacious table further along the veranda. Jonathan found himself questioned about his family, his education, his ambitions. All were met with polite nods but no great enthusiasm. It wasn’t until he described his dealings in surplus army food supplies that Mr Van der Post became enthusiastic.
‘Good, good. You have a business brain,’ he commented. ‘That is the way to get on in life—see an opportunity and exploit it.’
From then on the atmosphere around the table lightened. Mr Van der Post appeared to decide that Jonathan was acceptable and conversation became more general.
After lunch the four young people swam in the large pool, then played doubles on the tennis court. When the time came for him to leave, Agatha took Jonathan for a walk round the garden before he set off. They stopped to kiss under the cover of a jacaranda tree.
‘My father likes you,’ she to
ld him. ‘You must come again.’
He was soon a regular visitor.
The weeks flew by. The end of Jonathan’s time in the army was fast approaching. As he lay awake at night, he tried to come to a decision about his future. His senior officer had offered him promotion if he signed up to stay on in the army. That one was fairly easy to dismiss. He had enjoyed army life, but he did not want to make a career of it. Far more tempting was the prospect of staying on in Malaya. He was fairly confident that if he asked Agatha to marry him, she would accept. Her father would readily find him a job in his business and he would be able to enjoy a very pleasant way of life. But was that enough? If he was really clear-eyed, he knew that under the surface attraction, what he felt for Agatha was nothing compared to what he still felt for Scarlett. And then there was the third option—going home. Without Scarlett there to welcome him, England seemed a grey place, foggy and cold. And so he wavered, until people started talking about his going-away party and he knew he had to make his mind up. He went into town on his day off and bought a sapphire and diamond ring. Sapphires would match Agatha’s eyes.
On the morning he was due to see her again, a letter arrived, not from England, but from Paris. It was a brief note from the great Monsieur Bonnard, informing him that though a place at the Ortolan was not free at the moment, should one become available, he would be welcome to apply.
It was like a light coming on in his head. How could he have forgotten his first ambition, or all that time painstakingly learning his art at the Ortolan? What about those coveted Michelin stars? He would never be comfortable as the boss’s daughter’s husband in a trading company, and he would never be truly Agatha’s with Scarlett still in his heart.
He hid the ring at the bottom of his kitbag and started counting the days till he could board the ship for home.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1957
Bye Bye Love Page 19