After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  ‘Oh, Jane, please don’t bullshit a bullshitter,’ he said kindly. ‘Why don’t you try again?’

  For one split second she looked utterly furious but then she pressed her lips tightly together as if she were trying to smother a laugh. ‘Darling,’ she said reproachfully, as if it was bad form on Leo’s part that he wouldn’t let her place the tip of one finger on his shoulder and push him right over.

  ‘Do you want to try it again without the theatrics?’ he asked.

  They stood there in the rain, both of them waiting for the other one to blink. It wasn’t until Jane shivered that Leo unbent, unfolded his arms. ‘Come on,’ he said, and picked up her case. ‘Let’s get a drink.’

  The pub was a couple of streets away and empty, apart from a few stragglers in work clothes, lingering over pints rather than heading home.

  He drank beer, she had a glass of Viognier and Leo talked about how he missed that warm fuggy scent of flat beer and stale smoke there used to be before the smoking ban. He talked of pubs in the East End he’d gone to as an art student ‘because they were authentic and full of old men nodding off over their pints and copies of the Sun and we thought they were authentic too. They hated us for being pretentious, class tourists. Always used to shark us when we played pool.’

  He grinned. She grinned back. ‘Did you try to drink pints of bitter even though you really hated the taste?’

  ‘How do you even know what pints of bitter are?’ Leo pretended to choke on his lager and Jane giggled. ‘Didn’t you cut your teeth on champagne and canapés?’

  ‘After a while a girl can get bored of living off vintage champagne and gull’s eggs.’

  The pizza they’d ordered arrived and she ate two pieces. Leo ate the rest and when his belly was full and he was on his second beer he felt mellow, expansive; that must have been why she decided to confess. ‘I thought that Andrew, my ex, would take me back like a shot, but when I called him I had to tell him that I’d got married to you in Vegas. I had to. He was already talking about whisking me off to City Hall at soon as I landed at JFK.’

  Leo looked at her curiously. He still couldn’t tell when she was lying. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘There was quite a lot of name-calling, accusations; things said that are quite hard to come back from – again, I saw quite a different side to him. Not a side that I liked, so I decided that it was probably better to cut our losses.’ Jane sat back and wriggled her shoulders, as if she was relaxed and supine, but her fingers clasped around the stem of her glass were so white-knuckled and tense that Leo wondered if they might snap. ‘There you have it, darling. Honesty isn’t always the best policy.’

  ‘I didn’t come back for Rose’s money,’ he said quietly. ‘I came back because I did some things before I left, really shitty things, betrayed her trust, and I’m not going to tell you what I did but I want… need Rose to forgive me and yeah, I haven’t got off to a good start with that.’

  ‘I could help you,’ Jane said. ‘I do have rather a unique skillset when it comes to —’

  ‘Stop trying to play me,’ he said, sharply enough that Jane’s fingers tightened again. She put her glass down. ‘Why does it always feel like you have a secret agenda?’

  ‘Darling…’

  ‘No more darlings, no more bullshit,’ Leo decided. After last night, after whatever had happened with Mr Ex, she still had no reason to come back to him unless… ‘You did some digging on Rose, didn’t you? Shouldn’t have been too hard. All you had to do was type her name into Google or Wikipedia.’

  He’d done it himself, over the years. When the loneliness and the homesickness were a physical ache and he wanted to be close to Rose again. The handful of dry facts on a computer screen didn’t even begin to capture what Leo missed, but to a woman like Jane, used to a certain standard of living, they must have made for some interesting reading.

  ‘It’s no use,’ he told Jane, who dipped her head as if admitting that she’d been rumbled. Maybe that was why she wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘Rose isn’t going to leave me a penny, so if that was what you were banking on, then I might just as well call you another cab. Maybe you can still make it to New York tonight.’

  Leo placed his hands, palm, up, on the table, as if he were a magician wanting her to search him for concealed keys, hidden feints, before he pulled out his next trick. Jane placed her hands on the table too. ‘So, neither of us are the best people that we can be; well, tell me, who is?’ she said. ‘There’s no reason why we couldn’t make this marriage work.’

  ‘Why would you want to be stuck with me?’ Leo asked, because it seemed to him that the world was hers for the taking. That another rich man would soon come along to make everything better. ‘What’s in it for you?’

  ‘I had a very brief chat with my lawyer this afternoon, before I meet with him next week,’ Jane didn’t even attempt to answer his question. ‘It turns out we can’t get an annulment. Not for non-consummation, even if we had the Pope vouch for us. Neither of us are already married or related by blood and we can’t prove insanity either. Or temporary insanity.’

  ‘That’s a bummer.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. It has to be divorce, darling.’ Jane leaned forward so she could rest her hands on his, palm to palm. It felt like a dare, even though they’d already kissed, even though he’d been inside her. ‘I know you don’t trust me, that I’ve given you no reason to, but I have nowhere to go. Apart from what we won in Vegas, I don’t have anything. Andrew was quite insistent I FedEx my engagement ring and jewellery back to him right away so I can’t even sell them.’ She took a deep breath. ‘That’s why I was really hoping you might still need a wife.’

  ‘I don’t want to lie to Rose any more. I’m sick of lying to everyone, myself included,’ Leo said, even though it was nice to pretend that Jane had picked him, chosen him.

  ‘But it’s not a lie. We are married and I just thought, hoped, that we could go back to those two people that we were when we first met,’ Jane suggested.

  ‘All those days ago?’

  ‘Feels like years ago!’ Jane traced the length of his middle finger slowly and Leo could feel his cock hardening just from that fleeting gesture. He was a hopeless case. ‘Before we got married. When we sat in that bar. You, the charming stranger, and me, the damsel in distress.’

  ‘Was I really that charming?’ Leo’s eyes felt so heavy-lidded that he was amazed he could still see out of them.

  ‘You were devastating,’ Jane told him. ‘If I hadn’t just been jilted and if we’d been somewhere more private, I think you could have had me naked in about five minutes.’

  She was still stroking his middle finger up and down, slowly. So slowly. ‘I think you’re being too flattering,’ Leo said and this game he knew how to play. ‘Ten minutes probably. Ten minutes to get you naked, fifteen minutes to get you wet, twenty minutes to have you begging for it.’ Leo laughed when Jane snatched her hands away and put her finger to better use by wagging at it him, but she was laughing too. ‘Oh, Jane, Jane, Jane, please stop trying to play me, it’s not going to work any more.’

  The problem was that when she played him it was so much fun, and though Jane said that their new détente didn’t extend to her getting naked for him, they walked back to the house hand in hand. They were just in time to catch Rose as she came back from her night out with his mother.

  Rose looked tired, a little sad, and maybe it wasn’t the right time, but Leo had to try.

  Jane got there first. ‘Did you have a nice time with Linda? Dinner and a show, wasn’t it? What did you see, anything good?’

  Good manners took precedence with Rose. ‘A revival of Anything Goes . We weren’t in the mood for anything too challenging,’ she said and as she started to walk up the stairs, with the two of them trailing in her wake, her steps were slow and laboured. So different from how she’d marched along this morning. But it was late. She’d gone to the office and his mother was always hard work; no wonder Rose was exhausted.r />
  It was apparent that Rose needed all her breath for the climb up two flights of stairs but when they’d reached the top and were about to go their separate ways, Jane touched Rose’s arm. She was so much braver than Leo was.

  ‘We’re both so sorry about last night. I’m sure you must have heard me screeching like a Billingsgate fishwife,’ Jane said, getting straight down to it. ‘When Leo comes home in that state, it’s how I tend to react.’

  Rose’s smile was wintry at best. ‘And yet you still married him.’

  Jane squeezed Leo’s hand. ‘I had drunk rather a lot of champagne,’ she said as if she was confessing to a terrible crime, and a miracle happened. Rose grinned. It took fifty years, even sixty years, off her. She looked younger than Jane, more wicked than Leo, in that split second.

  ‘If I hadn’t drunk as much champagne as I have, then made some very questionable decisions as a result, I would have ended up leading a very boring, very quiet life,’ she said.

  ‘I am sorry.’ Leo couldn’t say any more than that, no matter how much he wanted to. There were things he didn’t want Jane to know, some things he wasn’t ready to remember himself.

  Jane tucked her arm into Leo’s. He thought about putting an arm round her shoulder but decided against it. ‘We had a fight. Not our first. Not our last and it’s not the end of the world, but if you’re fed up with us then we can easily stay in a hotel.’ Jane said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Rose snapped. That she wasn’t too tired to be annoyed had to be a good thing. ‘Of course you must both stay here. It’s a big enough house, but next time you feel the need to have a row maybe you can wait until you’re off the premises.’

  And with that, Rose tottered off down the corridor without even wishing them goodnight.

  19

  April 1944

  If King’s Cross station had heaved with people that September day when Rose first stepped off the train, it was nothing to Paddington on that Friday afternoon. The khaki and navy blue forces had swelled in number and were now converging with office and shop workers leaving the dreary nine to five behind them until Monday morning.

  It was all Rose could do not to get swallowed up in the crowd’s slipstream, but then she saw Danny. Even in a seething mass of people, she’d always be able to spot him. He saw her too, waved and smiled. If Rose got lost in his kisses then his smile always found her again.

  A tiny pocket opened up, big enough for Rose to hurl herself into Danny’s arms. Her feet left the ground as he picked her up and spun her round then set her down again.

  ‘How did you get even more beautiful since I last saw you?’ Nobody at MGM could have come up with a better line.

  ‘I missed you,’ Rose said because that was all that she could say. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

  ‘Missed you too, Rosie.’ He put an arm round her shoulders to guide Rose through the crowd, which had receded to a distant place because all she could see was Danny. The tiny cut where he must have nicked himself shaving, the tender back of his neck; that soft, vulnerable space between the collar of his flying jacket and the brutally shaved hair at his nape, and his eyes all crinkled up and sparkling every time he glanced down at her.

  There were no spare seats on the train and they had to wedge themselves into a tiny gap in a packed corridor. Danny kept his arm round Rose and fed her chocolate and stole tiny kisses that she was happy to give.

  They got off the train at Henley-on-Thames. ‘I booked a room,’ he told Rose. She’d been feeling so cosy, so cherished, but now panic knifed through her. She tried not to let it show but she could never hide anything from Danny. ‘No need to look so frightened, Rosie. Everything will be all right.’

  ‘You mustn’t think I’m like that and you’re not to get angry with me but…’ It was hard to talk about these things, even with Sylvia, much less with Danny who was the one who wanted to do those things to her. Rose couldn’t help thinking of Prudence and Patience’s father and how he was very fond of saying in his sermons that ‘our ability not to give in to our basest impulses is what raises us above the animals and the savages’. ‘I don’t want to be a savage!’

  ‘I’ve never seen a savage wear red lipstick.’ He was laughing at her but when Rose pouted, his expression softened. ‘I got you a little present, but don’t be getting any fancy ideas. Not yet anyway.’

  ‘What sort of fancy ideas?’ He didn’t answer but slipped a ring on the third finger of her left hand. It was too big. Rose had to make a fist to stop it sliding off. ‘Oh…’

  Danny playfully cuffed her chin. ‘No fancy ideas, I said. It’s just a cheap ring from Woolworths but after the war… Well, let’s see what happens at the end of the war.’

  He promised everything, but gave her nothing – only a ring that Rose worried with her fingers as they walked the dusky streets away from the station and towards the river.

  The hotel had seen grander days. The carpet and curtains were shabby and wearing thin, paintwork scraped, floral wallpaper faded. There was a collective lowering of newspapers in the lounge as Rose stood at the reception desk with a weak smile, clutching Sylvia’s crocodile attaché case as Danny signed them in as Mr and Mrs Smith.

  The room, their room, ‘the nicest one in the house’ according to the pimply-faced youth who took up their luggage and was rewarded with sixpence and a bar of chocolate from Danny, looked out onto the Thames. The water rippled darkly outside the window before Rose pulled down the blackout blind, then closed the curtains.

  Danny turned on the light and the bed and its blue candlewick cover was all she could see. She averted her eyes to the pretty Delftware jug and basin perched on the dressing table. The lip of the jug was chipped. Danny sighed. ‘Let’s go and get something to eat.’

  ‘Not downstairs. All those old ladies twittered when we walked in.’ If they went out, left the hotel, then it wouldn’t be a simple and quick matter to finish their meal and come back upstairs to a room with a bed in it.

  Danny sighed again but they soon found a little pub that served food and after she managed to force down a couple of pink gins Rose felt better. Her left hand was still clenched so the ring wouldn’t fall off but she could smile and nod and listen as Danny told her what it was like to fly at night over the unfamiliar British fields and valleys. Sometimes, he said, he wanted to keep on flying until he ran out of sky.

  They’d never spent so long in each other’s company with nothing to do but simply talk. Not that Rose had much to say because all she could think about was that bed and the dry words in the forbidden books in her father’s study. It wasn’t until they were served their steak and kidney pudding, which was more kidney than steak and more gristle than kidney, that she was able to look at him properly. Not just the individual parts, but the whole of him.

  He had shadows around his eyes as dark as bruises, his beautiful grin had lost a little of its exuberance and there was the faintest tremor in his hands each time he lit a cigarette. ‘Oh, but you’re not all right, are you?’ Rose exclaimed. She pushed away her plate, her food only picked at, so she could lift one of Danny’s hands and hold it to her face. He let her, eyes watchful and wary. ‘Please, won’t you tell me what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing you need worry about, princess.’

  ‘I’m not a princess. I don’t break that easily.’ The girl she’d been when she’d first jumped down from the train at King’s Cross and set her hat at the first two GIs she’d found had grown up an awful lot. Rose could take whatever Danny had to give. She was sure of it.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ he said, when she wouldn’t let go of his hand. ‘The last couple of months, they’ve been intense.’

  The thought of a tin box that could suddenly transport itself into the air always seemed fantastical to Rose but to climb into one night after night, to steal through dark skies, across the sea and over enemy territory took a foolhardy bravery that she couldn’t comprehend.

  ‘Don’t you get scared? I would. I’d be so f
rightened,’ she said, and he smiled faintly and held her hand instead of her holding his.

  ‘The funny thing about fear is that a fella can find himself doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get a taste of it. Like going on the big rollercoaster at Coney Island even though you know you’re going to lose your lunch,’ Danny said and Rose nodded. When she heard the whine of the siren and she started running for the nearest shelter, often caught up in a crowd, the ARP wardens shouting, sometimes she wanted to stop running and simply stand in the middle of the street, arms raised, fists clenched, and dare the bombs to find her. ‘I guess I am a little crazy. A guy who’s in full possession of his faculties isn’t going to sign up for the Air Corps. You’d try your luck at a safe job in a nice, warm office.’