Bye Bye Love (13 page)

‘I’m not any old Tom, Dick or Harry. I’m a friend of the Smiths. I’ve been coming here ever since they moved in.’

The woman looked unconvinced. ‘I never saw you before in my life.’

‘Look, just let me in, will you? It’s important. It’s a matter of life or death!’

‘Oh, well, I suppose—’

The woman took half a step back. Jonathan seized the chance, squeezed past her and ran up the main stairs and up again to the Smiths’ flat. He banged on their door.

‘Scarlett, it’s me! I’m sorry. I was wrong. Let me in, Scarlett!’

From inside the flat he heard a muffled voice. ‘Go away. I don’t ever want to see you again.’

It was terrible. It was like the end of the world.

‘Scarlett, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that.’

A male voice floated up from the first floor landing. ‘Too much bleeding noise round here. Put a sock in it!’

Jonathan ignored it. He slapped his hand on the door. ‘Scarlett, open up.’

‘Go away.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

She couldn’t mean that. She mustn’t.

‘I do.’

‘Scarlett, come on. I’ve said I’m sorry. Don’t ruin everything. I love you.’

There was silence on the other side of the door.

‘Scarlett?’

Then he heard movement. The lock clicked and the door opened. She looked dreadful. Her face was blotchy and her eyes were red from crying. Jonathan stepped into the room.

‘Come here,’ he said, and took her in his arms.

She clung to him fiercely, her head buried in his shoulder. He kissed her hair, felt its silkiness and the hard warmth of her skull beneath. It was all right. They were safe. He felt as if he’d just pulled back from the edge of a high cliff.

‘Say that again,’ Scarlett said.

‘Say what?’

‘You know.’

‘I love you.’

‘Really truly?’

‘Really truly.’

Some of the tenseness went out of her. She looked up at him. Her eyes were still full of tears.

‘I love you too. So much. Sometimes I can’t bear it. But my dad—he’s all I’ve got, and I’m all he’s got. We’ve got to stick by each other. You must see that.’

Jonathan thought of his own parents. They might seem distant, he might not get on too well with them, they might appear to put the pub and making money before him, but they were always there. He knew that he could rely on them. And, beyond them, there were the London relatives and the French relatives, a back-up family. It was hard to imagine having only one person in the world related to you, but that was how it was for Scarlett. Of course she had to stick by her father, however useless he was.

‘I do see,’ he said.

She raised her face to his then, her sweet lips opening to his. Still wrapped around each other, they shuffled over to the one armchair and collapsed onto it. They kissed again and Jonathan ran his hands over her new womanly curves, covered only by a light skirt and blouse. It was a long time before he remembered that his family and a celebratory meal were waiting for him at home, and even then he only left reluctantly.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ he promised.

Cycling back to the Trafalgar, he didn’t care how much trouble he was in. Scarlett loved him, and that was all that mattered.

It was the start of two magical weeks. Scarlett had taken her annual holiday to be with him, and they visited all their old haunts together, went to the cinema when it rained and spent a day in London looking at the tourist sights.

‘Whenever I see a picture of Tower Bridge or Buckingham Palace now, I’ll think of you,’ Scarlett said.

The time went all too quickly. Before Jonathan could believe it was possible, it was their final evening together. With the last of his money, he took Scarlett out for a romantic candlelit meal. She was enchanted.

‘I’ve never been anywhere like this before,’ she breathed.

All through the meal she held his hand and gazed at him over the table. Under the table their feet met and played. As they waited for dessert, she kicked off her shoes and ran her stockinged feet up and down his legs. Jonathan hardly noticed that the food was rubbish by Ortolan standards. It was Scarlett that he wanted to devour.

They finally stumbled outside into the cool darkness and wrapped their arms round each other. Scarlett sighed and snuggled against him.

‘That was so, so wonderful—’ she sighed ‘—it was the best evening I’ve ever had.’

Jonathan drew her into the shelter of a handy doorway and kissed her. Her mouth opened hungrily. He held her face in his hands, concentrating on her lips, her mouth, his senses reeling as her tongue slid over his. Intoxicated, he realised that she wanted him just as much as he wanted her.

‘Scarlett, Scarlett,’ he gasped as they came up for air. ‘You are so gorgeous. I love you so much.’

‘I love you too,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to go away. I want you to stay here with me for ever.’

‘I don’t want to be anywhere else,’ he told her.

But they both knew he had to go.

Somehow, they walked back to her street, stopping frequently to kiss long and passionately. But, however much they drew out the journey, they arrived at last at her door. Inside the porch, Scarlett leaned against the wall and pulled him to her. Jonathan felt the soft sweet curves of her body pressed to his with only a few layers of clothing between them. She pulled at his shirt and ran her hands up the bare skin of his back.

‘Kiss me again,’ she begged.

On fire, he did so, until both of them were breathless. Scarlett’s nails dug into his flesh.

‘You can come in,’ she whispered. ‘My dad won’t be back yet.’

Jonathan groaned. His body was crying out for hers. But a last vestige of sense held him back. She was only sixteen. He was going away.

‘I mustn’t,’ he managed to say. ‘I want to, but I mustn’t. I love you too much.’

‘Always and for ever?’ she asked, her voice cracking.

‘Always and for ever,’ he agreed.

1956
 

‘B
LIMEY
, bit hot out here, ain’t it?’

A squaddie who Jonathan hadn’t met before came and leaned beside him on the railings of the troop ship.

‘Better than being down below. It’s like a bloody furnace down there. At least there’s some breeze up here,’ Jonathan said.

‘Yeah. Nothing like a bit of fresh air. Smoke?’ The man offered an open pack of cigarettes.

‘No, thanks.’

‘Blimey, what’s wrong with you?’

Jonathan had often got this reaction from the others.

‘Bloke I worked for told me it spoils the taste buds,’ he explained.

Monsieur Bonnard and the Ortolan seemed a very long way away now, but his influence was still strong enough to stop him from smoking.

His companion shrugged. ‘Cheap round,’ he said, and lit up. He chucked the dead match overboard into the green water of the Suez Canal. ‘Funny to think that back home it’s winter, ain’t it?’

‘Yeah. They’re all suffering rain and snow and here we are in sunny Egypt,’ Jonathan said.

He wondered how Scarlett was coping with the leaks and the damp in that crummy flat of hers. When they got to Aden, he would be able to post the letters that he had been writing to her.

‘Rum place this, ain’t it?’ his companion said. ‘All them camels and palm trees and that. Like the pictures they used to show you at Sunday school.’

The two of them gazed idly at the slowly passing scenery. Flat-topped houses with minute windows huddled in groups, as if propping each other up. Goats and hens foraged in refuse heaps. A man in a long white shirt was riding a tiny donkey laden with bundles of sticks. Two women covered from head to foot in black were carrying pots on their heads.

‘Sure is,’ Jonathan agreed. ‘Really foreign.’

‘At least the bleeding ship’s not rocking about no more. God, I hate ships.’

‘I used to think I liked them, until I got on board this one,’ Jonathan said.

He had felt pleasantly superior to the men who were chucking up from the moment they’d got on board. He’d never been seasick, not even on the cross Channel ferries in winter. But being battened down below on a troop ship crossing the Bay of Biscay was another thing altogether, especially during a storm. The smell alone had been enough to turn his normally tough stomach, reducing him to a groaning wreck.

‘We got the Indian Ocean to do yet,’ his companion said gloomily.

‘Yeah, but before then we’ve got Aden. Two days off the boat! I can’t wait. I’m going to get in that water and swim and swim. Get all the sweat and dirt off me then lie on the beach.’

‘It’s one great big bleeding beach out there, mate.’

They both looked at the desert as it stretched out as far as the eye could see beyond the fringe of habitation by the canal.

‘As long as they let us off this ship, I’ll be happy. I’ve never been so bored in all my life,’ Jonathan complained.

The long days at sea were broken by nothing but drills and inspections.

‘Yeah, but look at it this way, mate. They’re paying us for doing sweet FA. That’s got to be good, ain’t it?’

‘Better than basic training,’ Jonathan agreed.

The basic training had been every bit as gruelling as he had been warned, but he had survived it and come out the other end to find himself posted to catering training. For a while he had harboured hopes of getting to the kitchens of the officers’ mess, as Monsieur Bonnard had said he should. A sergeant had spotted his ability and sent him on a B2 and then a B1 course, and all had seemed set for a recommendation for an A1 course, and promotion. But then some strange quirk of army organisation had come into play, and here he was on a ship bound for Malaya.

‘Anything’s better than that, mate.’

‘Oi, you two—’

Jonathan looked round. Three men sat in the shade of a lifeboat. One of them was shuffling a well-worn pack of cards.

‘Fancy a round of pontoon?’

‘Might as well,’ he agreed. After all, the scenery wasn’t that riveting. One camel was very much like another.

The two day break at Aden was over all too quickly, and then it was the long haul across the Indian Ocean. The days settled into a routine of inspections, drill, nasty food and long stretches of time playing cards and listening to the limited selection of songs played over the ship’s radio. After the ninety-ninth repetition, even
Rock
Around The Clock
failed to excite them. Everyone slept a lot. And then at last they sailed into Singapore.

Jonathan had hoped that he might get another break there, and get a chance to look round, see the sights, maybe even get to the famous Raffles Hotel. Some of the men were sent to a camp outside the city, but his contingent were loaded into lorries and sent off for acclimatisation before jungle warfare training started.

The one bright spot was that, by some miracle, a letter from Scarlett was waiting for him. Not only had it got there before him, but the postal system delivered it right into his hands. Jonathan devoured her words. She had changed her job again, the landlady had had the worst leaks fixed but the flat was still damp, she and her friend Brenda had taken to listening to Radio Luxembourg together and singing along with all the latest records but what she really wanted was a record player. For a while he almost forgot the heat and the insects, and imagined himself back in the cold streets of Southend in winter. Best of all were the last few lines, where she told him how much she loved and missed him, and ended with a row of kisses across the bottom of the page. He folded the letter up and hid it at the bottom of his kitbag.

A few days later, he tried to reply. He had sent off all the letters he had written on the ship, but now there were his first impressions of Malaya to get down. He read through his letter to Scarlett, flapping with his hand at the insects flying round his face and crawling over his legs. It seemed a pretty feeble effort. It did not convey the excitement of all the new experiences he had been bombarded with this last week. The only thing that was familiar was the hut. Wherever you were in the world, it seemed, you lived in a standard British army hut. Otherwise, it couldn’t have been more different from Catterick or Aldershot. Outside, it was pouring with rain like he’d never seen before, straight down like stair-rods. You could hear it hammering on the roof of the hut. But it wasn’t cold, like the rain back home, it was warm, and made the air steamier than ever. He looked at the faces of the men sprawled on the adjacent bunks. They were bright red and running with sweat. He supposed he must look the same. The acclimatisation hadn’t yet worked. They were in a kind of limbo, strangers in this new land of humid heat and lush vegetation, yet so far away from home that sometimes it was hard to believe that it was still there. There was only his photo of Scarlett and the letter from her to remind him, a thin thread connecting his old life with this strange and fascinating new one.

Across the hut from him, another man was sitting with a notepad on his knees, sucking the end of his pen.

‘Difficult, isn’t it?’ Jonathan said to him. ‘I mean, how can you tell them what it’s like here? It’s just so different from home.’

‘Just say it’s like bleeding Tarzan, mate. But no bleeding Janes, worse luck.’

It was like a Tarzan film, the jungle thick with huge trees, exotic greenery, hanging vines and stinging insects. He’d not seen any monkeys yet, but you could hear them calling from the trees, and when they lit the lamps in the evening, huge moths fluttered round them, as big as his hand.

‘You writing to your girl?’ someone asked.

‘My mum,’ Jonathan lied.

The men around him snorted in disbelief.

‘No use trying to hang onto a girl when you’re out here, mate. They’re not going to wait for you, are they? They’re not going to stay in of a Saturday night. They’ll be off out on the pull, all dolled up to the nines. No, mate, you want to give her the push, whoever she is. Once we’re through with this jungle training lark, get yourself fixed up with a nice little native girl. Plenty of them keen enough to have a British soldier for a boyfriend.’

‘I thought the Malays wanted us out of here. Isn’t that why we’re here—to fight the guerrillas and protect British property?’ Jonathan said, keeping well off the subject of girlfriends being unfaithful.

‘That don’t mean the girls don’t like us. We got money, ain’t we? Give ’em a few little presents and they’re putty in your hands.’

All around the hut there were guffaws and boasting as the men imagined what the girls might do for them. Jonathan looked at the date on the letter he was trying to write. It was nearly Scarlett’s birthday! Seventeen. Back in cold, wet Southend, Scarlett was about to be seventeen. She’d been more beautiful than ever when he’d seen her before being posted. Surely nobody could look at her without wanting her as much as he did? The other men’s words of warning echoed in his head. How could he keep the other boys away from her from this distance? There was nothing he could do but tell her he loved and missed her and hope that she continued to feel the same.

He need not have worried. Back in Southend, his only rival was Elvis Presley. Scarlett had taken a day off from working at the corner shop so that she and Brenda could go to the record shop in the High Street and listen to him. They stood in the booth and requested
Heartbreak Hotel
until they were told to buy it or go. Brenda bought it.

‘But you haven’t got a record player,’ Scarlett pointed out.

‘No, but Tony at work’s got a radiogram.’

‘You don’t like Tony at work.’

‘I never said that. I just told him I wasn’t going out with him. But maybe I’ll change my mind.’

Scarlett never could understand Brenda when it came to boyfriends. As long as she had someone on the go, she didn’t seem to mind who it was.

‘He’s creepy,’ Scarlett objected.

‘He’s not!’

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead with him.’

‘Oh, you, you’ve got eyes for nobody but your flaming Jonathan. That’s daft, if you ask me. Fancy waiting around for some boy who’s out in wherever-it-is when you could be going out and having fun with somebody here.’

‘I don’t want anyone else,’ Scarlett told her.

‘That’s what I mean. Daft.’

They were never going to see eye to eye on that one.

Scarlett had noticed that Brenda’s mum was putting on weight. She didn’t think much of it until she started wearing a maternity smock. Then she just had to raise the subject. She waited till one evening when she and Brenda were listening to Radio Luxembourg on the brand-new radio that Scarlett had saved up for. It was her pride and joy, far clearer and more modern-looking than the old thing they had brought from the Red Lion.

‘I thought you said your dad had left ages ago and you never saw him,’ she said.

‘Yeah, he did, and we don’t.’

They both nodded their heads to
Why Do Fools Fall
in Love?
Brenda sang along.

‘But…your mum…well…she’s wearing a smock.’

Brenda stopped singing. She gave Scarlett a hard look. ‘Yeah, what of it?’

‘So—is she having a baby?’

‘Yes, she is, as it happens. Anything else you want to know?’

What Scarlett really wanted to know was—who was the father, if it wasn’t Brenda’s mum’s husband. But the look on Brenda’s face stopped her from asking. You had to be careful with Brenda.

‘I just wondered, that’s all. It’s going to be a bit crowded at your place, isn’t it? I mean, there’s eight of you already, all jammed into your prefab.’

‘Yeah, well, with a bit of luck we might get a proper council house. They’re lovely, them council houses. Loads of space. Mind you, I’m still getting out as soon as I can. I’m fed up of living at home and looking after the little ’uns. It’s always me as has to see to them, and now with this new baby, Mum’s going to be more tired than ever. Just as soon as someone asks me to marry them, I’m off.’

‘What—anyone?’ Scarlett asked.

‘Anyone decent. Rich would be nice. Handsome would be nice. But as long as he can get me away from that lot, that’s it.’

‘What, even Tony?’

Brenda made a rude noise. ‘Oh, him! I’m fed up with him. I’m chucking him next time I see him.’

‘Good idea,’ Scarlett said. That at least was something they could agree on.