After the Last Dance (15 page)

‘There was a time, when he was in rehab after his overdose, that I blamed myself,' Linda said haltingly, her hands not still any more but twisting, fingers worrying at her rings. ‘He didn't tell you about that, did he?'

‘That's all in the past,' Jane said firmly, though it wasn't. Leo's drug-taking was as recent as two days ago.

‘Well, I don't blame myself any more, I blame him.' Linda's chin jutted out defiantly. She looked more like Rose than Leo now. ‘Ten years, and even now there are some nights when I get so furious thinking about him that I can't sleep. I know it's silly, but Leo wasn't around so I've never had the chance to tell him how I really feel. How
bloody
cross I am with him. So I say it to the Leo in my head over and over again.'

Jane didn't have conversations with her ghosts. She simply didn't let them in. When all this were over, Jane wouldn't allow herself a single sleepless night thinking about Leo. It was easier that way. ‘It's been ten years,' she said gently. ‘You should have just let him go.'

‘You can't with family,' Linda said. ‘When it's family, it's never done.'

‘He's not so bad.' It was hardly a ringing endorsement from a besotted bride. Jane could do much better than that, if only to reward Leo for those flashes of sweetness he'd let her see. ‘He has lots of good qualities. He's kind and wonderful at cheering people up when they're feeling down. He's funny, not in a mean way either. I think you'd find that he's changed.'

‘He's never given me that opportunity,' Linda bit out, then she gathered again. ‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't be talking to you like this. It's rude and inappropriate. I am usually quite a sane, rational person.'

‘I'm sure you are. Don't get me wrong, I think Leo is lovely, but he can be really annoying too.' Jane decided she could risk a small conspiratorial smile. ‘When he dares show his face again, I'll give him a good clip round the ear, if it would help.'

‘It might,' Linda agreed. She almost cracked a smile. ‘You've got your work cut out for you.'

‘I know. It keeps life interesting.' Jane uncrossed her legs and changed position, then crossed them again and it was that easy to shift the mood. Draw a line. Start again. ‘So, you mentioned Alistair? Is he still in Sydney? Have you been out to visit him?'

Alistair was clearly the golden child. A doctor, like his father and grandfathers. A first in medicine from Dundee University, three years at St Bart's then he'd joined Doctors Without Borders and worked in Niger, then Bangladesh where he'd met Vicky. They were now settled on Sydney's Upper North Shore and expecting their first child in January.

‘It's hard, both boys gone,' Linda said. Lydia had popped her head round the door five minutes earlier to ask if they wanted a glass of wine and Linda had nodded gratefully. ‘Gavin, my husband, he's taken a six-month sabbatical and we were going to fly out to Australia. Spend Christmas there. Vicky's mum has MS so she'll need a hand when the baby comes. Not that I want to step on any toes.'

‘Of course you don't, but it's your first grandchild. That's something very special.' Jackie had been positively skittish about the prospect of grandkids, though Jane had refused to be drawn in. ‘It would be lovely to escape winter. Have Christmas on the beach, that sort of thing.'

‘There's no way we can travel, not with Rose so ill,' Linda said flatly. ‘She's quite adamant that I should go, but I really I don't see how I can.'

It was all Jane could do not to squirm again. ‘Rose could still be going strong this time next year.'

‘She won't,' Linda said in the same dull voice. ‘I doubt she'll make it to the New Year. But she won't entertain the idea of hospices, says that if I don't go to Australia, she won't even let me in the house. I know that Lydia is as good as family, but it shouldn't fall on her.' She looked at Jane expectantly. ‘So, how long are you and Leo planning to stay?'

This was far beyond what anyone, even the most dedicated of young wives, could be expected to put up with. ‘I don't know. It was rather a spur-of-the-moment decision to come here.'

‘Because it isn't as if Leo is going to step up and… oh God, it's all such a muddle.'

It was left unresolved because the situation was unresolvable. Such a pity that life didn't come with a handy set of arrows pointing you in the direction that you should go, Jane thought as she saw Linda out the front door this time.

‘I don't really think Leo's a bad person. I still love him, but I wish he wasn't so careless. Doesn't ever think before he acts,' Linda said as she ruthlessly tightened the belt on her coat. The angry patches of red on her face had returned. ‘Maybe he has changed. Don't they say that the love of a good woman can change a man?'

‘I think he's
trying
to change,' Jane said, though she wasn't a good woman and he wasn't really doing any such thing. She might have talked him up to his mother, but she was seething that he'd dumped Linda on her in the first place.

Linda was lingering on the doorstep, neither in nor out. ‘The thing is, Jane, I can't worry about that boy at the moment when Rose… she's my last link to my mother; the only person who knew her when she was young, before she got married and had me and my brothers. She's told me so many stories, Rose has, but I'm sure there's still more stories to tell.' Linda swallowed hard, then opened her handbag and tried to pull out a little packet of tissues but her hands were shaking too hard.

Jane took the packet and handed Linda a tissue. ‘It'll all be fine. You'll have a lovely time with Rose while you're in town, then you can go back to Durham and take a couple of weeks to decide what you want to do. If there's any change with Rose, Lydia will call you.'

Gratitude made Linda hug Jane for one brief, awkward moment. ‘It's been very nice to meet you. Leo is a very lucky boy.' She looked beyond Jane to the house. ‘You'd better go in. All the heat's escaping. I dread to think what the energy bills are like for a place like this.'

Then she was gone: a hunched taupe figure crossing over the square, and Jane was left to drift back inside.

Despite the chill that crept in as the sun sank below the buildings and the persistent drizzle that had started almost as soon as he'd left the square, Leo walked.

Walked away. He knew he was a coward. He could have gone up to his mother, said hello, that he'd been meaning to get in touch now he was back in the country. Just as he could have sent her a postcard every now and again. Called her on her birthday. But he hadn't. It was easier not to, because then he didn't have to remember the disappointed look his mother had perfected when she was confronted with the worst examples of Leo's behaviour; it was a unique blend of reproach and bewilderment. From bad school reports to the time in sixth form when his girlfriend thought she might be pregnant to those sessions when he was in rehab. Family counselling. Except Rose wouldn't come, and his father thought the whole exercise completely self-indulgent, so it was just Linda sitting on a plastic orange chair with her disappointed look.

‘I blame myself.' She'd said it an awful lot over those two weeks. ‘It's not your fault. I know you're better than this.'

But he wasn't better than this. He was still a selfish little shit. Didn't know how to be anything else. So he kept on walking away.

He'd forgotten the simple pleasure of taking a walk. The trick was to stay vigilant and that way you got to see the good stuff: the carved lion on the keystone of a Victorian villa, the house with the grotesque gargoyle's heads on either side of the front door. Date stones and cornerstones. Leo experienced a quick, joyful tug of recognition with each one, like bumping into old friends. It was the same when he rediscovered the blue plaques for William and Evelyn de Morgan, Hablot Knight Browne and Alfred Hitchcock.

When he had a crick in his neck from looking up and the drizzle had upgraded to a downpour, Leo got on a bus, then another one until he was in Shoreditch; his old stomping ground.

The warehouses and factories were all tarted up now, home to designers, brand consultancies and trend-spotting agencies. People getting rich off bullshit. In that case, Leo should have been a millionaire several times over and as soon as he thought that, he heard a loud, grating voice behind him.

‘Leo?' Leo turned round. ‘Leo Hurst, as I live and breathe! How the devil are you?'

It was Scoffer. His old friend from his Chelsea art school days. Called Scoffer because he could hoover up lines of coke in the time it took everyone else to roll up a five pound note and stick it up one nostril.

‘I'm fine,' Leo said. ‘How the hell are you?'

‘Better than fine.' Scoffer had the well-fed look of a man who was used to expense account lunches and ten-course tasting menus. ‘God, it's been years. Let's have a drink.'

They found a bar that had been carefully restored to resemble the abattoir it had been a hundred years ago. Then there were many drinks and several helpings of artisanal triple-cooked chips as Scoffer regaled Leo with tales of models shagged, evil art dealers vanquished and collectors who paid him silly money to design installations for their houses. ‘How much does it cost to make a fucking neon sign anyway? Tossers!'

When the bar started filling up with people younger and hipper and with better hair than them, Scoffer invited Leo back to his studio, which took up the top floor of an old printing works off Shoreditch High Street. Even though it was past eight, there were still a clutch of assistants rushing about like they'd been cast as very busy people in a play. Scoffer told a pretty girl with ridiculously long legs to bring them some beers and they sat in his office, the city lit up and spread out before them and Leo reeled off all the tales he'd reeled off many times before. About going on stage in Tokyo and the Hollywood actress who'd given him a blow job, oh, and the time he spent a night in jail in Mexico, which he really wouldn't recommend and yeah, sure, let's do a couple of lines.

They were both full of bluster and bravado, but the proof of Scoffer's success was as tangible as the bitter taste in the back of Leo's throat as he snorted then swallowed. The envy, the disappointment, must have shown on his face because Scoffer placed a meaty hand on Leo's knee. ‘Look, mate, if it helps, if you need a job…'

‘Oh no,' He could hardly get the words out. ‘I'm lining up some big commissions. You know what it's like. Don't want to jinx anything.'

‘Course you don't. But I always need someone to think of ideas that I can work up. I wouldn't rip you off, boy. Pay you a decent day rate.'

Leo looked around the carefully curated space. At the stupid neon signs that said
THE
FUTURE
IS
TOMORROW
, and
NOTHING
IS
INFINITE
,
ONLY
DEATH
. The controversial Mexican Day of the Dead masks decorated with real human skin and teeth. The portraits of families living on council estates, their plasma TVs and pit-bulls rendered as lovingly as Gainsborough painted ships and horses.

It wasn't art. It was commerce. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

But Scoffer's bullshit paid for another couple of lines of coke and when they stumbled out onto the street and Leo fell to his knees on the rain-soaked pavement, Scoffer gave a cabbie fifty quid to take him home.

It was just like the old days. He threw up in the gutter, then staggered down the mews to bang on the door of Frank and Lydia's little cottage. They weren't very happy to see him, although it wasn't
that
late. Still the right side of midnight, so Leo didn't think there was any reason for Lydia to look like she'd spent all evening sucking on acid drops.

Frank turned off the alarm so Leo could get inside the house. He took the whisky decanter off the sideboard in the drawing room and all but crawled up the stairs.

Then he remembered Rose got angry when he came home like this. She wasn't well. Needed her sleep. He tried to tiptoe down the corridor but settled for walking quietly. It wasn't until he opened the door of his room, shut it behind him with exaggerated care then flung himself on the bed that Leo remembered he had a wife, who woke up with a muffled scream.

Jane lashed out and caught the side of Leo's face with her nails but he was already rolling off her. ‘Sorry! Sorry! I forgot I had a little wifey warming my bed.'

His words slurred and ran together. Leo winced as Jane turned on the lamp. Hoped she'd think that it was the light that made his pupils so dilated. As it was, he knew his face was dusted with beads of sweat and as he stared at her blearily, he could feel his jaw working.

She sat up, folded her arms and stared at him. Even wearing his old, faded Motörhead T-shirt with rumpled hair and absolutely no make-up, she was still too good for him. ‘Aren't you tired of this, darling?' she asked him and in that moment, as he sprawled half on and half off the bed, another old T-shirt stretched tight over his belly, he hated Jane for her pity.

‘Of what?' Leo touched a hand to his lips. He couldn't quite believe that he was still able to make sounds come out of his mouth. ‘Tired of what?'

‘The party's over,' Jane said. ‘About time you realised that everyone else has gone home.'

She'd obviously been taking lessons from Rose in how to make Leo feel so small that if it weren't for the slightly repulsed look on her face, which had circumvented the fillers and the Botox, he'd swear he was invisible to the naked eye.

‘Yeah, well… I'm going through stuff. Forgive me if maybe I wanted to get a little lost.'

‘A little lost?' She echoed incredulously. ‘Oh, so you needed some time off for good behaviour? What good behaviour?' She pointed a rigid,
j'accuse
finger at Leo. ‘You scuttled off and left me to deal with your poor mother. That was a real touch of class.'

‘I don't want to talk about my mother.' Leo tried to sit up but only succeeded in sliding further off the bed. ‘Let's not argue. I thought we were friends,' he added plaintively.

Jane rolled her eyes. The more he got to know her, the less sweet she became. It was simply sugar-coating.

‘Lydia asked you to come back because she expected that in the ten years since
you were carted off to rehab
, thanks for filling me in on that little detail by the way, you would have grown up, but she was wrong. God, was she wrong!'

‘You didn't have to come to London with me. You only came because it suited you.' Leo wasn't a mean drunk. He was a charming, witty, life-of-the-party, king-of-spontaneity kind of drunk, but not tonight apparently. ‘Don't forget that I saw you in action on the night we met. What is this, really? Some kind of scam?'

Leo didn't know if the mottled rash that broke out on her upper chest exposed by the gaping T-shirt was guilt or anger.

‘Don't judge me by your own standards, darling.'

It was Leo's turn to flush and he had the coke sweats now, so he didn't say anything but tried to stand up while Jane simply sat there and kept staring at him like he was lower down on the food chain than pond scum.

‘Stop looking at me like that,' Leo muttered. He finally managed to stand up and stagger to the bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face, which did nothing to clear his mind or make him feel better. He only felt worse, especially when he looked up to see that Jane had followed him and sat down on a stool in front of the vanity unit.

‘I'm sorry for being shrewish, darling. It's so silly the two of us arguing like this,' she said with a placating smile. ‘We've been thrown together by circumstance. Who knows for how long? And it would be so much better if we didn't spend the time fighting.'

Leo turned round a little too quickly and swayed against the sudden nauseating rush of blood to his head. ‘So you're staying?' There was no reason for her to stay with him. Not for his charm and good looks, certainly not for his money – unless this had become about Rose's money, in which case Jane was going to be bitterly disappointed. There was another thing niggling at him too. ‘You're not pining for Mr Ex? Not even a little bit?'

‘That's not really any of your business, darling.'

‘You must still love him, though? You don't just suddenly stop loving someone. Love doesn't have an off-button.'

‘Whether I love him or not is neither here nor there. Anyway, darling, we're getting off-message. We had a deal. I've met your great-aunt, I talked you up, tried to smooth things over as much as I could with your mother, but I really didn't appreciate you running off like that.'

She looked calm as she sat there, but her hands were clasped tightly together and she kept flexing her pink polished toes, which was very distracting when Leo had so much to process. He even opened his mouth and wondered what Jane would think of him if he confessed to the reason why he'd been banished, kicked out of the kingdom. Then he shut his mouth. He didn't need to explain anything to Jane. Anyway, she was hardly perfect herself.

‘I bet you'd be pining for him if all those billions of dollars from Google or whoever had landed in his bank account,' Leo drawled. ‘Yeah, you said that he was the one who jilted you, but I can't believe that if you'd really loved him you'd have let him go without a fight. So maybe it was you who did the jilting, because you didn't fancy slumming it.'

‘I married you, didn't I?' She shook her head and made a shooing motion with one hand as if she were brushing away Leo's words. ‘And don't be so naïve. There isn't a woman alive who actually wants to marry a poor man.'

‘That's what you tell yourself to make you feel better, is it?' Leo snorted. ‘No wonder you were in such a hurry to get married before your looks started to go.' He was determined to get a rise out of her – maybe as payback for judging him, for being so superior and aloof, or because it took his mind off needing another drink. Somehow his slurred words had hit a nerve because Jane gave a little start, an ungainly jerk, as if he'd managed to drunkenly stumble upon the fears that even she couldn't gloss over, that were there every time she looking in the mirror.

‘Careful, darling,' she said tightly. ‘People who live in glass houses and all that.'

It was a warning to back the hell off, but, as usual, he ignored it. ‘The funny thing about being a trophy wife,
darling
, is that it looks a hell of a lot like being a hooker.'

‘Says the man who couldn't get back to London quick enough once he discovered his rich great-aunt was dying,' Jane snapped. ‘What a pity she hasn't rolled out the welcome mat.'

Leo braced himself against the basin. He fancied that he could crush the porcelain with his bare hands. ‘That's not why I came back!' He said it, snarled it really, with enough force that Jane jumped again. ‘You don't know anything about it.'

She stood up, put her hands on her hips. ‘I know plenty. Honestly, how stupid do you think I am? You weren't just drunk in Vegas; you'd done some coke too, hadn't you? You even took some before we got on the plane and it's what you're on now. It's why your pupils are bigger than dinner plates and you've turned into a belligerent prick.' She nodded, as if it was all falling into place, like a deck of cards being shuffled by a maestro. ‘I also know that you were going to take the money we won. You'd gone into my bag, taken it out and you didn't even…'

‘Not all of it…' Leo protested and there was nothing like a fight to bring cold sobriety crashing down on his head, but it was too late now.

He could feel her anger as though it were the third person in the room, crouching there at her feet, ready to pounce on Leo. ‘You think I'm desperate? Well, at least I'm not some drug-addled, geriatric Peter Pan figure who can't function on any real level.' Jane's beautifully modulated voice was steadily getting louder and sharper. ‘I bet you spent most of your time in LA hanging out in coffee shops and hideous bars like that one in Vegas trying to score pot off college kids and asking them if they knew where the cool parties were happening.'