After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  When they got back to Kensington, Rose was still asleep. Agnieska was sitting by her bed and knitting. ‘I’m staying the night. Miss Beaumont is fine. Didn’t even wake when I took her blood pressure.’ She nodded approvingly. ‘The sleep will do her good.’

  ‘It’s not like a good night’s sleep is going to suddenly cure her cancer,’ Leo grumbled as they reached their rooms. ‘Maybe I should sit up with her.’

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ Jane said because he looked ashen with exhaustion. ‘Not tonight. Who knows what tomorrow might bring?’

  Leo traced a pattern on the floor with his toe. ‘We should try and get some sleep, then.’

  He just stood there, not moving, until Jane pulled him into the room and shut the door. All of Leo’s newfound assurance had vanished and he looked… untethered. It really had been such a horrible day. ‘I’m not even a little bit tired.’ she said. ‘Would you mind if we stayed up and chatted for a little bit… if you want to, that is?’

  ‘You mean, what the young people call hanging out?’ Leo sat down on the bed and toed off his sneakers. ‘Sometimes I think you learned to speak in the early nineteen-hundreds.’

  He was scowling again, which was hardly surprising.

  ‘Shall I tell you a secret? It’s guaranteed to cheer you up.’ Jane didn’t mean that kind of secret but Leo obviously thought she did because he nodded, his sudden smile a millimetre away from a leer.

  ‘Yeah, go on then. Give it your best shot.’

  Jane struck a pose; hand on hip, leg bent. ‘In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.’

  Leo looked at her as if she was talking in tongues. ‘What?’

  ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,’ she elaborated and when Leo shook his head and gave her a tiny, amused, almost pitying smile like he thought she’d completely lost the plot, she threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘Audrey Hepburn, darling! My Fair Lady , which I must have seen at least fifty times,’ Jane went into the bathroom. ‘That’s how I learned to speak proper.’

  ‘Really? How did you speak before then?’

  ‘Improperly. Mostly through a series of grunts and hand gestures.’

  Leo laughed, even though not a word of it was a lie. ‘I bet your first words were a beautifully constructed sentence in perfect RP.’

  Jane was already taking off her make-up but she made sure to meet his gaze as he leaned against the doorjamb so she could arch an eyebrow at him. She hadn’t been able to do that in a long, long time. She was too scared to subject the delicate skin around her mouth and eyes to anyone but the man she saw in New York who did her fillers and injectables. Maybe, as the feeling returned to her face, it would make her feel other things that she’d hidden away for so long that she thought they were truly dead and buried. ‘Hardly, darling.’ She managed to sound as artless and artful as ever.

  ‘Haven’t we moved past that whole “darling” crap?’ Leo edged into the bathroom, closed the lid on the loo and sat down. ‘You called me Leo in the car. Don’t even try to deny it.’

  ‘So I did.’ Jane concentrated on easing off every last scrap of make-up. Maybe it was the hours spent listening to Rose tell her stories, take stock of her life, pulling and picking at the threads, tracing them back to that first stitch. Or seeing Charles again, which had upset her, unsettled her, made her remember too much, but Jane wanted to tell someone her stories too. But there would be consequences…

  ‘Leo,’ she said deliberately, lingering over the two syllables. ‘Tell me more about the summers at Lullington Bay.’

  ‘What shall I tell you?’ he asked.

  ‘Everything,’ Jane said.

  So Leo told her about being allowed to stay up late and lighting bonfires on the beach and toasting marshmallows while Rose told them stories about America. Of drive-ins and cowboys and driving out to the desert to watch rockets fly into space and a hundred other things that she knew would enthral two little boys.

  While Jane’s face was soaking in cream from a pot of magical ingredients that cost over a hundred pounds, they sat cross-legged on the bed and he told her how he’d lie on the floor of the sitting room at Lullington Bay with Rose’s art books spread out before him and copy the pictures while Rose looked on approvingly. That she hadn’t been quite so approving when he got older and would get drunk on cider with the lads from the village and then slope off with one of their sisters to the little lane behind the pub.

  ‘She didn’t say much but you know what Rose is like. She can say plenty with just one look,’ Leo said and he pursed his lips, flared his nostrils and narrowed his eyes but still didn’t come close to approximating Rose’s disapproval. ‘She’d leave condoms under my pillow. They had to be from Rose. No way were they from my mum.’

  ‘No, I can’t imagine your mother going into a chemist to ask for a packet of Durex’s finest,’ Jane said. The thought of Linda, handbag clutched tightly in front of her, looking furtively about to make sure that none of the Rotary Club wives had spotted her, made Jane giggle and then she noticed that Leo wasn’t laughing along. ‘Oh, darling… Leo, don’t. Please don’t.’

  He was crying. Jane hated seeing people cry. Depending on the person, she could be sympathetic, stroking their hair and cooing platitudes, but now when she reached out a hand to gently touch Leo’s shorn head, it was different. Leo was different. Oh God, she was different. How had that happened?

  ‘You have all these happy memories of Rose,’ she told him softly. ‘That’s a lot more than some people have.’

  He didn’t say anything but covered his face with his hands as he must have done when he was a little boy who liked to look for pirate ships and stay up late to toast marshmallows.

  It was pure instinct to raise herself up on her knees and shuffle closer so she could put her arms around him, kiss the top of his bent head. ‘Please don’t cry, Leo. You’ll start me off too.’

  He mumbled something but it was unintelligible through the sobs he was failing to hold back.

  ‘Come on. You have to stay strong for a little longer,’ she said and he took a couple of deep breaths and when he raised his head, Jane wished he hadn’t because he didn’t even bother to try to hide his vulnerability.

  ‘I’m going to miss her,’ he whispered. ‘I wish I’d become someone she could be proud of instead of wasting all these years fucking about. She had all this faith in me and I blew it.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. You’ve shown Rose who you could be and now you owe it to her to become that person.’

  Jane was still holding him, foreheads almost touching. It felt very intimate, comforting someone. Not entirely unpleasant either.

  ‘It’s not that easy to become someone else, though, is it?’ Leo said quietly.

  Jane couldn’t help but smile. ‘Oh, it’s much easier than you think,’ she said. At that moment she was simply desperate to tell him her story, almost as much as she wanted to wipe the haunted look off his face.

  It was easier, safer, to close the tiny gap that separated them and kiss him.

  She kissed the next sob right out of his mouth and she kept on kissing him until Leo got the message that it was all right to kiss her back. He still looked like he might cry but that was only because Jane pulled back from him and peeled off her jumper and unclipped her bra. She was used to men looking like they might cry when she took her clothes off.

  Leo stared at her face fixedly as if it was a superhuman effort of will not to stare at her breasts instead. ‘Why? Why now? I mean, Vegas doesn’t count, we were both hammered.’

  Jane shrugged and his eyes did drift down to her breasts then. She’d have been insulted if they hadn’t. ‘Because I want to and because I think we both need to get out of our heads in a way that doesn’t involve artificial stimulants.’

  ‘I can’t even tell if you’re playing me any more,’ Leo muttered, even though Jane wasn’t. At least she didn’t think she was, but before she could contradict him he held up his hands.
‘Just so we’re clear, I’m allowed to touch, aren’t I? You’re not going to smack me again?’

  ‘Only if that’s what turns you on, darling,’ she drawled and this might just have been about trying to put him out of his misery but the way Leo kept looking at her with hooded eyes, his tongue caught between his teeth, made Jane wonder if she was really doing this out of the goodness of her heart. ‘Come here and kiss me.’

  Leo’s kisses tasted of all the sweet things Jane had ever known: champagne and red velvet cake and pink spun sugar from the fair. She did smack him when he shaped her breasts and whispered, ‘I thought you said we weren’t going to do anything that involved any artificial stimulants,’ because they were all her. No implants. Just the fat sucked out of her arse to plump up what had barely been there. She was still mostly bones and edges and hard lines, but it seemed as if her flesh spilled voluptuously into Leo’s reverent hands. He said he’d never felt anything so soft as her breasts and thighs and the tiny bulge of her belly as he rubbed his cheek against it.

  Jane couldn’t help but laugh even though sex was never a laughing matter. ‘You’re tickling me,’ she whispered.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered back, although only the moon glinting through the window was witness to the two of them sprawled on the bed.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s a good kind of tickling,’ she said and Leo, even as he had his hands full of her, gave her a suspicious, fearful look as if could actually hear the cogs whirring in her brain.

  ‘Oh no,’ he murmured fiercely. ‘Don’t even think it, Jane.’

  ‘But now I’ve thought it, I can’t unthink it,’ she reasoned. ‘Are you ticklish? I bet you are.’

  Leo tried to hold her back with kisses but her hands were already skimming down his back, tugging his T-shirt out of the way to trace figures of eight with the tips of her fingers.

  He squirmed away from her, but Jane let her touch dance against his rib cage and then under his arms. Leo was helpless as a baby as she sought out his secrets. Jane watched incredulously as he giggled and moaned and begged her to stop when she ran her fingertips along the soft skin of his forearms.

  ‘I think you needed to laugh even more than you needed to get laid,’ she said as he batted her hands away and lay back panting. It was true. He was always joking, always smiling, but he never really laughed.

  ‘There’s not been much to laugh about lately. And actually, now you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh. Not properly.’

  Then it was Leo who comforted her, although Jane wasn’t crying but wearing the same neutral expression that seemed to take an awful lot of effort these days. But still, Leo drew her closer so he could kiss the shadows away from her face.

  Maybe sentimentality was contagious but it seemed to Jane that Leo healed every inch of her that he touched, his mouth a warm, wet, insistent thing as he travelled down her body. She wasn’t so damaged or broken that she had to fake it (not all the time) and Leo was good at this. Really good, she thought, her eyes rolling back in her head, as he draped her legs over his shoulders and feasted on her.

  It was no wonder all those women, all those other men’s wives, had been so hot for him when he was so clever with his hands and his mouth, so generous with his attentions, so pleased that Jane was pleased with him that he let her go once and then twice, though strictly speaking it was his turn now. She twisted under him as he fucked her with his fingers and at the same time his tongue kept stroking over her again and again and again.

  ‘No. Stop. Stop,’ she said when she could speak again and it didn’t take much effort to coax him up the bed because he was so hard and needy for her. He sighed in relief when she grasped his cock in her hands and began to rub it gently.

  ‘You’re so pretty, Leo,’ she purred, her cheek brushing against his prick. ‘Is this all for me?’

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ he said, reaching out for her, but Jane pulled away and stuck her tongue out at him.

  ‘I want to do this,’ Jane insisted. ‘You just lie back and think of England.’

  In the end, he gave up, and let her do God’s work. Jane had certain smarts in this department too, had always got rave reviews, and she wasn’t surprised that the things she did, both of them naked now, made him buck his hips and beg her to fuck him.

  She’d barely got started, had only just lowered herself onto him, when he came undone. Coming and crying under her and she didn’t despise him for being weak. This time, Jane understood. She stayed where she was, her flesh fluttering all around him as she licked his tears away.

  ‘Come on, Leo, this was meant to make you happy,’ she sighed. ‘Why are you so scared to get happy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Then he looked up at her. His face was still damp but he smiled. It was a shaky, watery smile but it was exactly what Jane wanted to see. ‘I don’t usually come that quickly. Honestly. You can call some of my exes and they’ll tell you I could go all night. Then they’ll tell you that I’m insatiable.’

  ‘Darling, I’d already figured that out all by myself,’ Jane said. Leo did laugh then and he was still half hard inside her, and got even harder when she dragged his hands up to her breasts.

  ‘Seriously though, are these real? They feel real.’

  ‘Oh!’ She gasped as he worked one nipple between thumb and forefinger, pulled the other one into the wet heat of his mouth so she could hardly think. ‘I’m not sure that any of me is real,’ Jane said, though she hadn’t meant to.

  ‘This… right now, this is real,’ Leo said and he sat up, his chest, skin so warm, flush to hers so he could kiss her again.

  It was the first time Jane had told a man exactly what she liked, instead of pretending that everything they did was fine with her. Leo was very biddable. He gripped her wrists, held them tight behind her back because she needed that tiny hint of pain, as his mouth worked her breasts again, licking, tugging, sucking and eventually, to reward his efforts, Jane rose above him and slowly, inch by inch, took him inside her again. She wondered if Leo felt as if he was plunging underwater into oceans warmed by the sun too.

  Then he seemed to instinctively know that a hint wasn’t going to be enough and he flipped them so he was on top, Jane underneath and he rode her like that. His hips snapping against hers, her legs wrapped tight around him and she was almost there, needed one more deep thrust, one more filthy word whispered in her ear. She was straining towards something just out of reach, just beyond her grasp.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Leo said. ‘I’ve got you,’ and he pushed her over the edge.

  33

  May 1945

  Every day the papers listed the foreign towns and cities, a sea away, which had been reclaimed by the Allied forces. It was hard to reconcile the pictures of women in headscarves, small children waving flags, all cheering as the tanks rumbled past, as a decent exchange for what had been lost.

  When they liberated the concentration camps, those terrible places with ugly names, even Rose was shocked out of the torpor that had settled around her like a fine mist of perfume. She sat in a cinema with her hand to her mouth as she watched the newsreels. Impossible to believe that the sepulchral mountains of parchment-white skin and bones could have once been people. But they had been, and there was a collective disbelief that any one person, never mind whole nations, could be so evil.

  It would have been easier to pretend that it hadn’t happened, but Rose danced with men at Rainbow Corner who’d seen it first-hand. They were different from the other men who’d passed through on their way back home. There was a haunted quality to them; a certain desperation in the way they held Rose just a little too tightly.

  Back in Kensington, Yves had put his fist through a wall in sheer helpless rage and Madeleine cried all the time. She cried as she peeled potatoes, tended her beloved vegetable patches and scrubbed the kitchen floor. She even cried in front of Edward when he visited, which he did quite often. He always arrived with something – flowers, a toy, on
ce a bottle of red wine – and the sweetest, softest smile for Rose as if he were remembering the kisses they’d last shared, of touching every inch of her body. But on the day the papers were full of the liberation of Auschwitz and Madeleine was crying as she laid the table, he took Madeleine in his arms and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘They won’t get away with this,’ he told Madeleine in a clenched voice. ‘I promise you that.’

  They hid the papers in the coal bucket so the little ones wouldn’t see but when Thérèse woke up screaming three times in the night, Rose retrieved the newspapers and burnt them.

  But there was so little time to mourn when there was so much to celebrate. The bombs had stopped falling and one Monday night at the end of April the blackout officially ended. The next day the papers reported that Hitler had committed suicide and suddenly, when it had been a grim reality for so long that Rose couldn’t imagine life without it, the end of the war was inevitable.