After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  ‘Don’t cry, Rosie, my darling,’ Mickey said but she couldn’t stop.

  She’d spent so long trying to be brave and strong and it had been easy because there was always a place she could go to forget all her troubles.

  ‘What will I do now? Where will I go? Who’ll have me?’ She wasn’t even talking to Mickey but had lifted up her streaming eyes to the heavens.

  Rose started to shimmy down the lamppost, sweaty hands making her slide down too far and too fast so the couple below her had to wriggle down too before she sent them flying.

  Mickey called out to her just before her feet hit the pavement, but she turned, tripped away, down this street and that street, until she found a quiet courtyard and could sink down, head in her hands, and weep for all that was gone.

  She didn’t know how long she cried but when she stopped, sniffling rather than sobbing now, Rose realised that she wasn’t aching from the pain of it all, but rather because she was sitting in the kerb on a cold February night and her coat was still hanging up in the cloakroom at Rainbow Corner. Fat lot of good it was going to do her in there. She shivered and looked up to see Edward standing at the mouth of the alley.

  It was such a shock to see him that for a moment she mistook him for one of her ghosts. In the same way that every platinum blonde might be Sylvia, every slender, dark girl could be Maggie and the sound of a plummy, breathy voice always made Rose look round to see if it were Phyllis back from the dead. But her ghosts were just ghosts and Edward was walking towards her now, a tentative smile on his face.

  ‘I saw you nearly break your neck climbing down that lamppost,’ he said, as if the memory wasn’t a happy one. ‘Then I saw how upset you were and I didn’t want to intrude. If I am…’

  ‘You’re not intruding. Not at all,’ Rose said and she patted the space beside her as if it were a soft, inviting couch and not hard, unyielding pavement. ‘You can pull up a pew, if you want.’

  The thought of Edward watching her cry, or howl to be more accurate, made Rose bristle a little, but not that much. He’d already seen the very best and the most dreadful worst of her, but he was still here, sitting down next to her, trying to place his coat over her shoulders.

  ‘There’s no point in both of us being cold,’ Rose said, but she let Edward put his arm around her so she could nestle against him. ‘Goodness, you startled me appearing out of the shadows like that but now I think about it, I’m not surprised you’re here.’

  ‘I thought about raising a glass to dear old Rainbow Corner in some dreary German beer hall, but I couldn’t bear to miss saying goodbye, so here I am.’

  ‘But you’re going back there again?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘I have to. You see, it’s not —’

  ‘You once said it was impossible to say no to me, so I’m asking you to not go back to Germany. To stay here. With me.’ She stared at his rigid profile. A little muscle in his left eyelid pulsed when she clutched hold of his knee. He had ever such bony knees. ‘Please, Edward. Everyone leaves me and they don’t come back. I hate it.’

  He shook his head. ‘I have to see it through. Don’t you understand? I’d rather be anywhere but there.’ Rose slipped out from under his arm so she could hold him. She kissed his forehead, his temples, took his face in her frozen hands so she could press her lips to his.

  ‘Is it awful?’ she whispered.

  Edward shook his head again as if he had no adequate words. ‘I would say that it’s unimaginable, but that would be a lie, because it did happen. That’s why it’s important to bear witness. To shout from the rooftops until everyone knows.’

  Rose began to cry again, though she felt that she had no right to cry when her suffering was unimportant, infinitesimal compared to what others had gone through. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry too. Please don’t cry any more.’ He turned his head so he could kiss her hands. ‘Shall I tell you something that will make you smile?’

  She didn’t think anything could make her smile but now that Edward was here, being so tender and now so playful, when he hadn’t let himself be either of those things before, Rose could only think of how much she’d missed him. ‘You can give it the old college try.’

  He gave her a sudden wicked smile. ‘Earlier I popped into my club and a man from the Home Office felt the need to cross the bar expressly to tell me, and this is a direct quote, “that girl of yours is a damn bloody nuisance”.’

  Rose gurgled with laughter. ‘It wasn’t my Mr Costello, was it?’

  ‘Probably your Mr Costello’s boss.’

  ‘I hope you told him that the Home Office and the acres of red tape they expect one to wade through are a damn bloody nuisance too!’

  ‘I did nothing of the sort.’ He pulled away from her hands. ‘Rose, it’s far, far too cold and we’re far too well brought up to sit in the gutter like this.’

  Edward stood up and held out his hand. Rose let him pull her to her feet. ‘There were just so many people and when they shut the doors of Rainbow Corner, I felt so sad. Like nothing good was ever going to happen again. I feel wicked for saying this, but I miss the war. In a way, it was glorious, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?’

  She’d lived with the uncertainty of war for so long and now every day was the same. Life seemed smaller. The good times weren’t harder, faster, brighter compared to the bad times, which no longer plumbed the depth of despair and depravity. Without the highs and the lows, Rose felt adrift, as if she were merely treading water, the horizon never getting any nearer or further away. So yes, she rather missed the war.

  ‘It made heroes of us all, didn’t it?’ Edward said, as he linked his arm through hers and led her out of the alley. ‘Whether we deserved it or not.’

  Edward, in his quiet way, was a hero. He’d saved lives, rescued widows and orphans and even now, when other men were hanging up their uniforms, he was avenging the people whose lives he couldn’t save.

  ‘I’m not much of a heroine,’ Rose said. ‘Not when I ran away to London for excitement and glamour and because I didn’t want to be a Land Girl and wear corduroy knickerbockers.’

  ‘You’ve had heroic moments. We all have,’ Edward said emphatically and maybe he was right. Maybe they all were heroes in their own small way.

  They’d come out onto Piccadilly now where the crowds were drifting away, rushing to catch last trains and buses back to the suburbs. ‘Can we go somewhere?’ she asked, because she didn’t want her last memory of Rainbow Corner to be streaked with tears and she didn’t want to go back to Edward’s flat. Not yet. ‘Somewhere that we can dance.’

  ‘And drink champagne. The American Bar at The Savoy seems appropriate. Let’s find a taxi.’

  There were no taxis. ‘Anyone would think there was a war on!’ Rose said as they walked along Coventry Street. ‘It will be odd when all the GIs finally go home not to hear an American accent any more. You don’t sound remotely American.’

  ‘I’ve lived here since I was eight so any accent I did have was thrashed out of me at prep school,’ Edward said. They were holding hands now and Rose was wearing his coat because it was easier to wear it than argue over whether she should wear it. ‘I’ll have to go back to New York for a while once this business in Germany is over.’

  Rose came to a halt in the middle of the street. ‘You said that you’d come back after Germany. To me. You didn’t say you were going away again.’

  He stared at the hand that she’d been holding as if he couldn’t quite understand why she’d let go. ‘You see… well. I thought – that is, I hoped you’d come with me.’

  ‘But there’s too much to do here. There are all these people turning up and none of them are fit for work. They need somewhere to stay and food and warm clothes. How am I meant to go to New York?’ she demanded and she didn’t know why she was thinking of reasons, excuses, obstacles to stop her, but then someone else had promised her the world and that promise had been as empty as his heart.

  Edw
ard stepped back from Rose. ‘It would be easy enough to take on an assistant for you but if you’re set on staying here then I won’t try to change your mind,’ he said stiffly. ‘I was mistaken. Forgive me.’

  That was the other thing that Rose missed about the war. How it simplified everything into yes or no, black or white, dance or sit this one out. Everything was so much more complicated now. There were no handy little pamphlets from the government to tell you what you had to do. Rose couldn’t tell Edward that she loved him, but she knew that she wanted to be with him for as long as he’d have her.

  ‘Haven’t you realised by now that I often say things that I don’t really mean?’ she asked him. ‘If you could bear to be around someone like that, then I would still quite like to go to the American Bar with you, and maybe New York,’ she persevered and Edward wasn’t looking quite so boot-faced as he had done. He even held out his hand for Rose to take. ‘I did hear a rumour that there’s no rationing in America. That you can just walk into a store and they allow you to buy whatever you want. I can’t even countenance such a thing.’

  ‘Probably a cruel rumour. I’m sure they have to ration some things, otherwise it would just be bad form.’ Edward still sounded a little wooden. ‘Also, when we get back from New York, I’m going to buy another house. Would you like to live by the sea, Rose?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said but she wasn’t going to allow herself to say any more than that. First he had to go away again and then come back. Then there might be a trip to New York and only then would she think about whether she wanted to live by the sea.

  ‘I think it would be lovely to have a little cottage somewhere in Sussex or Kent. To be in the country, but also to be near to the sea.’ He shot her a sidelong glance. ‘When I’m in my barren hotel room in Nuremberg, reading witness statements, I close my eyes and think of the two of us sitting in an English country garden, with apple trees and rose bushes in every colour you could think of. I can hear birdsong and beneath that, the sound of waves lapping against the shore. There has to be a garden like that somewhere in England, surely?’

  Edward smiled at her bashfully as if he hadn’t meant to say that much but Rose was pleased that he had. They were walking past Charing Cross station now. Soon they’d reach The Savoy.

  ‘I missed you,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you came back.’

  36

  ‘I missed you,’ Rose said to Leo the next morning. ‘I’m so glad you came back.’

  ‘I missed you too, Rose.’ He ever so gently lifted the hand that didn’t have the cannula carved into it and kissed her wrist right where her pulse must have once beat out a frantic rhythm. It was faint and thready now. She smelt of something slightly over-ripe, like flowers a day away from drooping decay. ‘I wanted us to be friends again.’

  She smiled. Awkwardly patted his cheek. ‘I missed you so much. Promise that you won’t go away again.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Guilt gnawed at him. That was why he was doing penance now at her bedside, had done the entire nightshift, because yesterday he’d been a no-show. Yesterday had been terrible. Probably not as terrible as it had been for Jane, left to sit with Rose for hours and who’d left Rose’s bedroom looking as if she’d narrowly avoided a collision with a ten-ton truck, but still pretty bad.

  Rose was in the weeds now. Weeks had become days and the days were shrinking down to hours. Hours that he’d wasted going to Leytonstone and back with George on a day when Leyton Orient were playing at home. They’d sat on the Tube and George had suddenly said, ‘We agreed that when she got to the end, she wouldn’t see me. Said it would be too cruel for both of us. But the end has come too soon and I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye to her.’

  Then George had cried again and even though the train was stuffed full of men, testosterone thick around them, Leo had taken George’s hand and dared any of them to call him out.

  But when they’d got to the art storage facility, the woman on the desk had refused to let Leo in without two forms of ID and signed permission. She didn’t care that Leo was on a clock.

  He’d shouted at her. He’d sworn at her. Then he’d wept as George gently pushed him to one side and said, ‘My dear boy, stop causing such a commotion. I can sign us both in,’ because if Leo had stopped to think about it, then of course George was Rose’s designated curator.

  The painting was propped up against the bedroom wall but now, no matter that it symbolised the gulf between them closing up, Leo couldn’t give it back to Rose. The cliff-edge, the dark sea – it was too prescient. He wanted to cry again.

  Maybe it was being off the booze and pills. He wasn’t numb any more, but having to feel everything.

  There was a gentle tap at the door. Agnieska, about to finish the night shift, and Neta, about to start the day shift, were here to reload the pump, check Rose’s blood pressure and temperature, change the bed linen and ‘make Ms Beaumont a little more comfortable’.

  It was a hackneyed old cliché but there was a certain truth to ‘live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse’, thought Leo as he left the room, though he wasn’t sure he qualified. Apart from the living fast. God, he’d done that.

  ‘Morning, darling.’ Jane was slowly negotiating the stairs with a laden tray. ‘I thought you’d be ready for breakfast.’

  She reached him and set the tray down on the occasional table that had been placed outside Rose’s suite along with two armchairs and they breakfasted together. There was a tense moment when Jane told him off for leaving crumbs in the butter, but he found comfort in the mundane. ‘God, now I feel bad about enjoying a piece of toast and marmalade and a pot of tea that’s been left to stew for just long enough.’

  Jane paused with her knife in the raspberry jam. ‘I don’t know how I feel any more,’ she said, holding up a piece of Lydia’s sourdough toast as evidence. ‘I’m eating my feelings instead.’

  ‘Morning.’ They both turned to greet Dr Howard, who opened the door to Rose’s suite just wide enough that he could slide through, then shut it behind him. As if there were all sorts of arcane rituals going on inside.

  ‘Was she awake?’ Jane’s voice dropped to a whisper as if anything louder might penetrate the walls.

  ‘Not for long, but she said she’d missed me and she was glad I was back.’ God, he was on the verge of tears again . ‘I can’t even tell you what that means.’ He let his voice drop even lower. ‘Even if she goes today, I had that moment.’

  Jane took his hand, her fingers smeared with jam, and Leo lifted it to his lips, as he’d done with Rose, and kissed Jane’s knuckles. Jane’s skin was tea-warmed and pulsing with life. ‘She talked a lot yesterday,’ she said. ‘About the past, mostly, but she said that when she was ready, she wanted us both there. Said she was so pleased that you’d come home then too.’

  Jane was a consummate liar. Leo was sure that you could hook her up to all sorts of devices and she’d never give herself away. But Rose had told him the exact same thing, so they couldn’t both be lying. ‘Look, this thing between us, I know it’s complicated, but I’m glad you stuck around. Not sure how I’d have coped if you weren’t here.’

  ‘You’d have coped just fine,’ Jane said. Now that was a lie and they both knew it. ‘Darling, any chance of having my hand back so I can drink my tea and eat my toast at the same time?’

  ‘So you’d rather eat breakfast than hold my hand?’ he asked Jane, because that little thrum between them had started to vibrate again. ‘God, you’re a heartless wretch.’

  She pouted. ‘I’m not, darling. I’m just very hungry.’

  He dropped her hand. ‘There. You can have it back, then.’

  ‘Let me finish my toast and then you can hold it again,’ she promised, like she wasn’t his wife but a beautiful girl he was flirting with in a bar.

  If they stayed married for fifty years, had breakfast together every morning, would he inevitably take Jane for granted or would he always flirt with her like she was a beautiful girl he’d just met
in a bar? It was worth thinking about.

  ‘As long as you wipe the jam and butter off your fingers first,’ he told her with a grin. ‘You’re kind of sticky.’

  ‘So I am,’ Jane agreed and she sucked the offending fingers into her mouth, smiled round them when he raised his eyebrows and —

  ‘God! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’

  The frightened, mewling voice was loud enough to breach the walls.

  Leo froze in an agony of indecision. Should they go in? Would they see something they shouldn’t see? Would it be compromising Rose’s dignity? So many reasons to sit there and do nothing…

  Then a reedy, high-pitched wail that had both of them bolting into the room where Rose was propped up between Neta and Agnieska, stalled on her journey to the bathroom. Static white hair fell into a face that was distorted in pain, hands clutching at nothing, while even the good Dr Howard looked on helplessly.