After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  It took just over a week and then it all stopped. Rose was at work and doing battle with the urn, which was on its last legs, when the BBC announced that the war was over. Everyone stopped talking. Even the anaemic sausages in the pan stopped spitting. ‘Can it really be true?’ someone asked and then everyone cheered and a young lad leapt over the counter and tried to kiss Rose but she stamped on his foot. Mr Fisher was so swept up in the moment that he declared that tea and buns were on the house.

  Rose had never seen anyone quite so tight-lipped and furious as Gladys Fisher as she watched her husband give away free buns to all and sundry. Then, while she was still reeling from the shock, he closed the café and opened the bottle of sherry he’d hidden away for that very day, that very moment. The pair of them got quite tipsy as they waltzed around the tables and chairs, and they told Rose to go home and that she could have tomorrow off too.

  Tuesday, May the eighth, VE Day. All of them, the little ones as well, walked into town. Madeleine was still crying but she said that they were joyful tears and Yves and Jacques bought red, white and blue hats from a hawker standing outside the Royal Albert Hall and red, white and blue ribbons that the girls tied in their hair. They walked through Hyde Park and everyone they passed smiled and said hello and ‘isn’t it wonderful news?’

  They joined the crowds outside Buckingham Palace but they were packed in like sardines and a policeman said that the King and Queen wouldn’t appear for hours and Rose was so worried that the children would get crushed that they ended up walking home and sat by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens to eat their sandwiches.

  ‘I don’t want to go back,’ Gisèle said in her heavily accented English to Rose as they made their way back to the house, the children dragging their heels and complaining that they were tired. ‘This isn’t home, but home isn’t home either.’

  For Rose, home was Rainbow Corner; it was her anchor, her lodestone, but that night, as soon as she walked through the doors, she was gathered up and spilled back out onto the pavement.

  She found herself arm in arm with a pair of sailors marching through the heaving streets to Trafalgar Square. There were flags everywhere, the lights blazing defiantly after all those years of darkness, and people, so many people. Clinging to lampposts, splashing through the fountains, on top of the stately lions that had kept guard throughout the war. Rose joined the end of a massive conga line and she laughed and cheered and sang ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and made a good show of it, a newspaper man even took her photo, but she wondered why she had to pretend to be happy. Surely she should have simply been happy?

  Later, as she walked towards Mayfair, she wondered if the triumph was worth all that they’d sacrificed? Maybe that was why victory felt like the end of a deathly dull party that had dragged on for far too long and now one was walking home through cold, empty streets knowing that there was no food in the larder, no money left to feed the meter.

  But she wasn’t walking home. She was going to Edward. There was every chance that he might be out drinking brandy and smoking cigars with his Whitehall buddies in a gentlemen’s club, but he’d never yet let her down.

  So Rose wasn’t at all surprised to hear his footsteps coming towards her when she knocked on his door. She didn’t think he’d been home long because he was still in his uniform, jacket unbuttoned, and he had that soft look he often had when he’d been drinking. ‘I was hoping to see you tonight,’ he said and she stood there and delighted in the tremble in her legs, the way she suddenly found it hard to breathe.

  Some nights, as soon as he closed the door behind her, Edward would tell her to take her clothes off in that precise, proper voice of his and he’d stand there and watch her as she made herself naked for him, but tonight he simply took her hand and led her to the sofa. ‘I have a bottle of champagne I’ve been saving – will you have a glass?’

  Rose fussed with her hair, tugged down her skirt and fidgeted while Edward was in the kitchen. Her hand shook slightly as she took a whisky tumbler from him that was almost full to the brim.

  ‘I’m afraid my champagne glasses were yet another casualty of war,’ he said as he sat down next to her. He was so serious tonight and Rose was all wrong-footed because usually, by now, he’d have kissed her at least.

  Still, he watched her sip champagne as hungrily as he would kiss her. Despite all the things they’d done, Rose felt inexplicably shy. She was blushing as she put the glass down. ‘I thought the end of the war would mean something,’ she said at last. ‘That it would make everything better, but it hasn’t. Not at all.’

  ‘Well, it’s not quite over yet. There’s still the war in the Far East.’

  ‘But that’s the Far East – it’s awfully far away, otherwise they’d call it the Near East.’

  They both smiled and the tension eased enough that Rose could toe off her shoes and tuck her legs up underneath her. She wasn’t nervous now, but relaxed into Edward’s intent gaze because he’d told her so many times that he loved to look at her. Not that he loved her, she didn’t think he’d ever say that again, not now she’d explained matters, but it was comforting to know that on the outside she was still the same girl, fresh off the train, that he’d first met all those months ago at Rainbow Corner.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here. Well, I’m always glad when you’re here but there was something I wanted to tell you in person, not by letter,’ Edward said casually as he removed his cufflinks and placed them on the end table. ‘I’m afraid I have to go away.’

  ‘Where are you going? You won’t be gone long, will you?’ Everyone had left her, but not Edward. He was meant to be constant. He was meant to be here whenever she needed him.

  ‘I’m going to Germany,’ he said and instantly, her world hollowed out.

  ‘Why on earth would you want to go there ?’ Rose turned to look at Edward but, for once, he refused to meet her eye.

  ‘I have to tell you something,’ he said woodenly though it couldn’t be worse than him going to Germany, to be among those people. ‘It might come as a shock.’

  ‘What? What do you have to tell me?’ she demanded.

  He shrank back from her slightly. ‘I’m Jewish.’ He actually flinched then as if he expected Rose to strike him, or turn away from him in disgust, though she had absolutely no inclination to do either of those things. ‘Or rather my mother is – was – so according to Judaic law and well, Hitler, that makes me Jewish too.’

  The relief made Rose quite lightheaded. ‘Is that it? Goodness, for a moment you had me worried. Anyway, I thought your mother was American.’

  ‘Rose.’ Edward slowly shook his head, fought back a smile. ‘The two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Officially, her family left Russia in the middle of the last century to further their business interests. Unofficially they came to America to escape persecution. They did very well for themselves. My grandmother married a banker and somewhere along the way her history, her religion, the family that had been left behind in the shtetls, got erased. It’s rather curious really – I’ve never set foot in a synagogue, quite happily eaten bacon and done whatever I pleased on the Sabbath, but lately being Jewish seems terribly important.’

  Now Rose could understand why he’d spent all that money on buying up houses for what turned out to be seven Jewish refugees. But she couldn’t understand why he’d want to leave her to go to Germany where those bastards had tried to wipe his people out of existence. ‘I think going there would be a dreadful mistake,’ she said and she took his hand and tried to put everything she couldn’t say into the way she laced her fingers through his. ‘I don’t see how it would achieve anything. The war is over now.’

  Edward disentangled their fingers, but didn’t let go of her hand. ‘I was a lawyer before the war and I shall become a lawyer again. I’m going to find the people who were responsible for the concentration camps, for all that suffering, and make them confess their crimes. Put them on trial. Bear witness for their victims. They have to be held accounta
ble.’

  ‘Edward, they’re not people! They’re animals.’

  ‘No! They are people. If we think of them as animals then we allow them to abrogate all responsibility for what they did. We forgive them for just blindly following orders.’ Even though he was keeping it tightly wound like cotton on a reel, Rose could feel his anger. ‘Justice must be served.’

  Rose knew, with a dull, resigned certainty, that when he came back, he wouldn’t be the same. He’d be fundamentally altered. She could bear to lose Edward – her sweet, serious Edward – too. The thought made her ache. ‘I wish there were a way I could change your mind.’

  Edward patted her arm to signal that he couldn’t take her wishes into account. ‘While I’m gone, I need you to do something for me,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot of things actually.’

  ‘Watering your plants and forwarding your post?’ Rose frowned. ‘Don’t you have someone who comes in to do that for you?’

  ‘Nothing like that. We have all those empty houses in Kensington and no one to live in them and there are all those people with nowhere to go. I’m going to send them to you,’ Edward said as if that was a perfectly sensible plan. ‘You’ll need to sort out their papers, rustle up some British relatives who’ll sponsor them, oversee work on the houses, furnish them. Then you’ll have to find jobs for the ones who are able to work, but even the ones who can’t, they still get a roof over their heads. They’ll all have somewhere to call home.’

  ‘I can’t do that!’ There were a hundred, a thousand reasons why she couldn’t. Rose started with the most obvious one. ‘I haven’t got time. There’s my job —’

  ‘Rose, you’re wasted in that café. You should be doing more with your life than mopping floors and peeling carrots.’

  ‘You can’t just magic paint and long-lost relatives out of thin air.’ The war hadn’t even been over for a day and Rose knew that when she went to the shops in the morning, the shelves wouldn’t suddenly be crammed with all the things that had slowly disappeared. ‘I tried to buy a packet of hairpins and the shopkeeper looked at me as if I’d asked to buy the Crown Jewels.’

  Edward was unmoved. ‘Money won’t be a problem. My lawyer and my man of business will help. You can even put Mickey Flynn on the payroll if you have to.’

  ‘But, Edward, I can’t!’ She rose up on her knees so she could look him in the eyes. He looked steadily back at her, and then reached out to smooth back the one errant lock of her hair that would never stay pinned and rolled. ‘No one would take me seriously. I’m just a girl.’

  ‘You’re the only person I trust to do it.’ He sighed. ‘Besides, once you’ve set your heart on something, it’s impossible to say no to you.’

  ‘That’s simply not true,’ Rose said because all people ever did was say no to her.

  ‘Let me remind you.’ Edward stood up, walked over to his desk by the window and opened one of the drawers. ‘I didn’t want to give this to you before… You tried to put a brave face on it but I know you’ve been sad, so dreadfully sad, and I didn’t want to add to your burden.’

  He held out a sheet of paper but Rose made no move to take it from him. She didn’t think she could bear even an ounce more unhappiness.

  ‘You asked me to find out what had happened to your… friend?’ Edward prompted.

  Rose shrugged. She already knew what had happened to her friends. If she could get through an hour without thinking of the three of them, then it was a good hour until she remembered she had no business feeling good and she felt wretched all over again. ‘What?’

  ‘Your Danny,’ Edward said. Oh, that friend. Rose had long made her peace with the complicated, conflicted loss of Danny because it didn’t begin to compare to the agonising pain of her girls being snatched from her. But when Edward held out the paper to her again, she shook her head. Once she saw the words, black on white, then it was real.

  ‘Just tell me,’ she implored. ‘Do it gently.’

  ‘Sergeant Daniel de Franco, Aircraft Maintenance Division. A successful bombing crew are only as good as their ground staff but your Danny was never a pilot. He’s now back in Newport, Massachusetts where he has a wife and two children.’ He paused and made sure to hold her gaze. ‘I know it sounds rich coming from me, but I am sorry, Rose.’

  It should have been a shock; in a way it was, but it also made utter sense. Now, with only seconds to parse this new information, it was so obvious, so hidden in plain sight, that Rose felt like the biggest fool. It had just been a game to him to win her heart, her slavish and dogged devotion, and for what? One lousy night in a hotel in Henley-on-Thames.

  As she so often did these days, Rose thought about what her girls would have said if they’d known. Maggie wouldn’t even have feigned surprise. Phyllis would have been indignant and angry on Rose’s behalf and Sylvia – Sylvia would have laughed and laughed as Rose was doing now. She laughed until the tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘Well,’ she spluttered. ‘Well… at least he’s not dead, I suppose. That’s something.’

  The worst thing about thinking Danny dead was that it hadn’t really mattered, not just because of what he’d done to her but because she didn’t have the room to mourn him too. Even the good memories – his beautiful face, the sound of his voice and the way she’d felt when he’d kissed her – were faint and indistinct.

  And then there was Edward, her Edward, because Rose realised in that moment that she thought of him as hers. She’d known him now for twice as long as she’d known Danny. Had spent hours and hours with him. So many hours that if she squashed them all together, they added up to days, even weeks. Not just the hours that they spent in the dark, his body teaching her body new shapes and patterns…

  ‘I knew this would upset you,’ he said and he peered anxiously at Rose as she sat on his sofa still shaking with mirth at the utter idiocy of it all, trying to mop up the tears with the back of her hands. ‘You’re quite hysterical.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m just stupid! I’m so stupid I can hardly stand it.’

  Edward must have thought she was a lost cause because he left the room but returned almost immediately with a handkerchief and a glass of water. He sat down, dipped the white linen square in the water and began to dab her face with it. ‘You’re not stupid. You’re the bravest, loveliest, sweetest person I’ve ever known,’ he told her softly.

  Rose stilled instantly under his soothing touch. ‘I’m not any of those things.’

  ‘You’re also very young and you’ve been through so much already.’ The handkerchief was discarded but he continued to stroke her tear-streaked face with his hands, tilting her chin so she was bathed in the glow of the lamplight. She’d never been this naked in front of him. Not even when she was actually naked. ‘I was wrong to ask you to —’

  ‘No, you weren’t.’ She rested her hands on top of his as they cupped her cheeks. ‘I want to do it. It works both ways, Edward – this finding it impossible to say no. Anything you want me to do, just ask and you know that I’ll say yes.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Anything.’

  34

  Leo was awake when Jane came out of the bathroom next morning. He was sitting on the side of the bed in his shorts looking very sure of himself. He smiled when he saw her. ‘I’ve decided that I’m going to get through today without crying,’ he announced.

  Jane paused in the doorway. ‘Let’s not get carried away. Until lunchtime maybe, darling?’

  ‘I’ve also decided that you’re not to call me darling any more.’ He stood up and stretched.

  Jane had only had her touch to guide her last night, but now she could see he had muscles and hollows where before he’d been soft and doughy. ‘I call everyone darling,’ she said absently.

  ‘I’m not everyone,’ Leo said and that had to be a precursor to a talk about where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there, but he just scratched his head and padded to the bathroom. ‘I won’t be long. Are you going downstairs? Could yo
u stick the kettle on… or actually, I should probably check, see if there’s any change…’

  ‘We’d know by now,’ Jane said. ‘If there was anything to know.’

  Rose had slept through the night, Lydia told her in awed tones, as if Rose were a usually fretful baby.

  Neta, who’d arrived for the day shift, was with Rose when they took the trunk up to her room. Today was very, very different because Rose was lying flat in bed, waiting for Neta to arrange the mound of pillows to her liking, a silk scarf covering her hair. Maybe Jane hadn’t noticed her gradual decline, had never seen Rose in her prime, but suddenly, in the space of twenty-four hours, she looked as if she was dying.

  Her skin was yellow now rather than simply having a yellowish tinge and her skin hung on her bones as if she were slowly deflating. Rose’s eyes were closed, her breathing uneven like a record jumping and one hand plucked at her belly, which was distended enough to be visible even under the bedclothes.