Bye Bye Love

by Patricia Burns

  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 wido
w 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.

  ‘Pack it in, Scarlett! Look what you done to me!’

  Scarlett made a threatening movement with the shovel.

  ‘Get your stuff and get out before I make it worse.’

  He shuffled over to the television, which was still happily telling them about a washing powder that washed whiter, grabbed his repair bag and made for the door. Scarlett realised she was enjoying this. A feeling of power surged through her.

  ‘This is the last time I do anything for you,’ Brian said resentfully.

  Scarlett couldn’t believe what a coward he was. He could easily overpower her if he tried.

  ‘You shouldn’t try and take advantage,’ she told him. She exchanged the shovel for the poker and advanced on him, ready to strike again. ‘Out! Out of my house!’

  ‘Bitch!’ Brian spat, and made off down the front path.

  Scarlett slammed the door on him and leaned against it. Her heart was racing and her chest was heaving. She felt more alive than she had done for weeks. She laughed out loud.

  ‘Got you, Brian Hopkins!’ she shouted.

  The incident had given her a surge of energy. She turned off Emergency Ward 10 on the TV, found her old favourite, Radio Luxembourg, on the radio and sang along with the music as she gave the floors the best polish they’d had since well before Simon was born.

  By the time Simon needed his next feed, she was pleasantly exhausted. She flopped on the saggy sofa and watched him as he chomped away, his little face fierce with concentration.

  ‘It’s no good, this not having any money,’ she told him. ‘It means people think they can push you around. And I tell you something, that blooming Brian’s really made me think. I’m not going to be taken advantage of like that any more, and I’m not going round asking for favours. I’ve got to earn some money somehow, and I’ve got to do it with you and your sister around.’

  Her attention wandered to the television, which was now trying to persuade her to buy a new vacuum cleaner.

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ she said to Simon. ‘Just imagine, a vacuum cleaner and a washing machine and the fridge back! I’d hardly have to do any housework at all. It’d be like one of those American places you see on the films.’

  It was an impossible dream. She took Simon off the breast and laid him over her
shoulder to wind him.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll settle for the fridge back,’ she said as she rubbed his back. ‘I really miss that. But first we’ve just got to get enough to live on, and have more than just beans or eggs for dinner. I tell you what we’ll do, we’ll go and look at the ads in the newsagent’s window tomorrow morning.’

  Simon gave a big windy burp. Scarlett laughed.

  ‘There’s a clever boy! So that’s decided, then.’

  When he was fed and changed, she laid him down in the drawer she was using as a crib, then bent over the cot and kissed Joanne on the forehead. The little girl was deeply asleep, her arms spread on the pillow. Scarlett was overwhelmed with a wave of love. They were so sweet and so helpless. They depended completely on her.

  ‘Things will get better, my darlings,’ she promised them. ‘We won’t be poor for ever.’

  The next morning saw her on the street corner, studying the postcards on the newsagent’s board. Amongst the things for sale and rooms to let and kittens wanting a good home, there were only four jobs going—one for a hairdresser’s apprentice, one for home work addressing envelopes and two for cleaners.

  ‘Better go for the cleaning,’ Scarlett told the babies. ‘Let’s hope they’ll let me bring you along as well.’

  She made a note of the addresses and set off. The first woman took one look at the pram and refused to even consider employing Scarlett.

  ‘I’ve got a nice home. I don’t want sticky fingers all over it,’ she said.

  The woman at the second address was more accommodating.

  ‘That’s all right, just as long as you can get the work done,’ she said. ‘Shall we try it for a week and see if we suit?’

  Scarlett was all too ready to agree. It was arranged that she should work for three hours every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. Scarlett wheeled the pram back home feeling elated. She had started to take control of her life again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE cleaning money made a real difference. If it hadn’t been for Victor, Scarlett might have been able to manage. But her plan to control how he spent his wages failed. Neighbours started waylaying her in the street and knocking at the door.