After the Last Dance (17 page)

Still, a change was coming, easy to determine simply from the sheer number of men passing through Rainbow Corner. Every night was a sea of eager yet anxious faces and Rose had no time between dances to share anything more meaningful than a name and a quick gulp of something cold.

Every night Phyllis claimed to have some inside information that she shared as they all got ready for bed, whispering fiercely in case Mr Bryce upstairs was a German agent as well as working in the accounts department at St Pancras Town Hall. ‘They're going to wait for a full moon, bomb Berlin to pieces then parachute in as many men as they've got parachutes for,' was just one of the things she'd heard.

Rose would stuff her fingers in her ears because she didn't want to think of Danny flying his plane on a bright moonlit night so he could be easily picked up on radar and then… she couldn't bear to think of what might come after ‘and then'. All she could think about was the Friday night to Sunday night, two whole days they'd spend together. Her and Danny. Rose thought about all the funny things she'd saved up to tell him; she'd put dibs on Maggie's dark green silk dress and Sylvia had marched her to the chemist in Soho, the one with the words ‘Birth Control Specialists' in huge letters stuck onto its window.

Rose had darted across the road so she wouldn't even be seen standing outside the shop. Sylvia had gone in, then come out ten minutes later clutching a brown paper bag, which she'd thrust at Rose.

‘A box of Volpar gels and three French letters, the good ones. I'd no sooner trust a johnny from a Yank than a Yank who said he had a johnny,' she hissed. When her blood was up, her language became quite ripe. ‘You owe me nine and six.'

‘Nine and six! But I was saving up for a perm!'

‘A perm wouldn't take on your hair and you'd be forking out more than nine and six if you got saddled with a baby,' Sylvia said, but she never stayed angry or sulked for long. So three days later when a telegram arrived from Danny asking Rose to meet him at Paddington the following Friday night, Sylvia even agreed to lend Rose her crocodile skin attaché case.

Leo slept somewhere else. Jane didn't know where and she didn't care. She'd locked the door, tried to wedge a chair under the handle, but he left her alone. Not that Jane slept.

She was too rattled to sleep. The memory of Leo looming at her, invading her space, hot breath on her, then his hands… she shook from thinking about it.

Though once she'd stopped shaking, when she did finally calm down, force her tensed muscles to relax and replay the scene, doubt began to creep in. He hadn't really loomed but he was just so much taller than her and she'd felt boxed in. Jane hated being boxed in. There'd been nothing more than a light touch on her arm, just his fingers, not even hard enough to grip her, let alone make bruises or angry marks. It was hardly a capital offence.

She'd overreacted, and as soon as she realised that Jane felt… not repentant, but a bit ridiculous. When she'd first met Leo she'd instinctively known that, despite his many other failings, he wasn't the type to hurt a woman. Now she was seeing things rationally again, she knew that this was still the case.

It was just that she'd been hurt so many times before and the way that he'd cornered her, come at her, had triggered memories of bad times and bad men from Gateshead to Moscow, and that wasn't Leo's fault. It
was
Leo's fault though that he'd come home wired to his eyeballs and laid her bare as if he'd stripped her as ruthlessly as those other men. He'd seen beneath her carefully constructed shell to what lay beneath…

Now everything was fucked up, which was what happened when you were winging it rather than following a proper plan of action.

For one moment, as she lay there, Jane even considered calling Andrew, but it was only a temporary lapse in judgement and she'd been having far too many of them lately. She'd burned her bridges with Andrew. He'd probably forgive her, but Jackie was never going to welcome her back with open arms. Besides, Andrew was still minus his tech billions.

Jane had sat huddled and brooding on the bed for so long that without her noticing, the darkness had receded. It was morning.

A new day.

Time for yet another new beginning.

 

Leo spent the night in a cold bedroom on the other side of the house. Normally after he'd come down, the buzz worn off, he could sleep standing up. One time, at a party, he'd even fallen asleep on the draining board with his feet in the sink.

But that night, he didn't sleep. He lay on the un-made-up bed and stared at the shadows, the beams of light stretching across the ceiling every time a car passed by outside, and he thought of Jane's face. Her beautiful, unadorned face all twisted up. The way she'd lashed out. The words she'd spat at him.

She'd been angry at the barbed accusations he'd thrown at her, his clumsy attempts to make amends, but mostly she'd been frightened. Now that the drugs were no longer fogging his senses, he knew that. Angry and scared looked similar but they were very different animals. No one had ever been scared of Leo before. He was a lot of things that he didn't like, but being
that
guy, the kind of guy who women wouldn't want to be alone with unless they had a clear path to the door, was something that made him feel sick to his stomach.

It was gone nine. He was too full of self-loathing to sleep so he might just as well get up. Leo spent long moments hanging onto the basin in the en-suite staring at his face for clues. There were scratches on his right cheek from where he'd startled Jane awake and a cut just above his eye courtesy of her throwing arm. The cut was crusted with blood, a muddy purple bruise just below it, made even more shocking by the greyness of his face. He deserved it.

Deserved the bloodshot, puffy eyes that wouldn't open any wider than a slit, jowls thickening his jaw, the sagging belly which spilled over the top of his jeans.

Deserved more of Jane's wrath, which she'd had hours to bring to the boil so he walked down the corridor and into his bedroom with his shoulders hunched in dread and expectation.

It took a while for his sluggish brain to register that Jane wasn't there, which Leo was grateful about, though it felt like a temporary stay of execution. Then he realised that all her things had gone. Clothes, shoes, the prodigious number of potions and unguents all packed up in her Louis Vuitton case and spirited away by his days-old wife.

He should have been glad that there was no morning-after row, but all Leo felt was an overwhelming sense that once again, he'd spectacularly fucked up. Maybe a quick and painless death might be preferable to always disappointing anyone who got too close to him.

Death didn't come. Instead, when Leo stepped out onto the corridor again, it was at the same moment that Rose was walking past. She stopped and turned to face him. Leo stood there and wished he could shrink away to nothing so that all that was left of him was a small pile of soiled clothes that Lydia could give to the gardener to incinerate.

Rose was wearing all black and dark glasses. This morning, she was utterly terrifying. Leo was sure that if she took off her shades she could turn him to stone with her ice-blue glare.

‘Hey, Rose,' he said as brightly as he could, like it was business as usual. ‘About last night. If I disturbed you… we disturbed you…' Leo scratched his head. ‘We had a bit of a domestic. Me and Jane. So, yeah. Sorry.' His tongue had swollen to twice its normal size and he had to squeeze the words past their impediment. He smiled cringingly and still Rose stood there, silent, unmoved.

‘I really am sorry. Not just for last night, but, you know, everything.' Leo said it again, not just for Rose's benefit as she stood there still absolutely frozen, but because if he said it often enough and loud enough, then maybe it would stick. ‘Not going to happen again, I promise.'

Rose stepped past him and walked away, as if she hadn't even seen him or heard a single word.

He turned and watched her walk, her stride as strong and sure as it ever was, then she reached the stairs and was gone.

How many times had Leo walked away from old girlfriends? Girls who thought they were The One until they found out that Leo was screwing someone else behind their backs? He'd crossed over countless roads to avoid countless friends he owed money to. Ducked into fast food joints and drugstores and once even a beauty parlour to avoid someone who wanted to give him a hard time. He'd never thought about how it would make that person feel. Now he knew. You felt like a ghost. Like your words were nothing more than the meaningless movement of teeth and tongue and breath. Like you weren't even there. Then he thought about that one time in Sydney, walking through Bondi Park, nowhere to duck and cover, so he'd walked right past his own flesh…

Leo heard the click of the front door. Rose must have left for the office. She was in her eighties. Dying, so she said, and she was going to the office when it was all Leo could do to shower, shave with dangerously shaking hands, then stumble down to the kitchen.

Lydia was sitting on one of the stools around the central island, laptop open as she consulted her big kitchen diary.

‘I'm sorry,' Leo said, because when you'd said it once, the next time you said it, it hardly took any effort at all. ‘So sorry about last night, Lydia. About waking you and Frank up like that. I was a total arsehole. Please say we're cool.' He smiled and the cut above his eye pulled and throbbed. ‘How about I put the kettle on and you find me some ibuprofen and maybe make me your famous scrambled eggs?'

Lydia checked something in her diary, tapped at her keyboard. Then she looked up. Leo wished that she hadn't.

‘I don't forgive you.'

He waited for her to say something else, to qualify it, though it wasn't like he needed any clarification, but she sat there, chin now resting on her hands, her normally good-natured face set in hard, uncomfortable lines.

‘Come on, Liddy, I've said I'm sorry,' he said falteringly, on unsteady ground now. ‘I mean it. Rose isn't speaking to me. Jane's left me. Don't you stick the knife in too.'

Lydia stared off to the left, then turned back to him as if she'd come to some long drawn-out decision. ‘I've spoken to Frank. He agrees. I should never have asked you to come home.'

She sounded like her mind was made up and there was nothing he could say in his defence. ‘Look, I know I can be a bit of a dick. I'm trying to change that.'

‘No, you're not. Not even a little. I thought we could be a team. Be there for Rose because she should have her family with her right now and you used to be her family.' Her voice was tightening and she was staring off to the left again, because she was close to tears and Leo knew that if Lydia started crying, then he would too.

‘I still am,' he said a little desperately. ‘I still could be.'

‘No. You can't.' Lydia got up from the stool.

‘When Rose gets back, I'll apologise properly, explain to her…'

Lydia walked over to where Leo standing in the doorway and looked up at him. ‘You disturbed her last night.
Twice.'
Her eyes were moistening now and she blinked rapidly. ‘You can't be here. You're no good. I can give you some money, if you need it, but there's absolutely no point in you staying.'

By now he should have been used to his failure to live up to the very low expectations that people had of him. ‘I can help,' he whispered. ‘I
will
help. I'll change. This is the kick up the arse that I need. You have to believe me, Liddy.'

‘I've heard you make this speech so many times,' She gently touched the cut on his face. ‘As soon as you've had a few drinks, it will all be forgotten. And what about Jane? She tore out of here without even a goodbye. Had a car waiting for her. You buggered that up, didn't you?'

‘Oh God, don't even ask. I've screwed up everything.' Leo would have given anything to sink to the floor and hide his face. Turning over a new leaf wasn't meant to be this hard. ‘I'll sort things out with Rose and you won't even know I'm here. I won't be any trouble.'

‘It's a bit late for that,' Lydia muttered, but Leo thought she might be wavering, wondered how he could press home his advantage, when there was a knock at the back door.

They both turned, eager for the distraction. It was Mark, Lydia's son-in-law, though he'd only been Lydia's daughter's boyfriend back when Leo had first known him. He looked older, crew-cut streaked with grey, but when he saw Leo standing there he grinned and he was instantly the same cocky lad that Leo had got into all kinds of scrapes with.

‘Hello, mate. Heard you were back.' Mark was obviously still working on the maintenance team because he was wearing paint-encrusted coveralls and stayed by the door so he wouldn't track dirt on Lydia's gleaming slate tiles. ‘Also heard you'd got married. She do that to you, then?'

Of all his current woes, the cut on his cheek was the least of it. ‘Something like that, yeah. How are you? Still working for the firm, right? Is Bill still in charge?'

‘No, he retired a couple of years ago. I'm the boss these days.' Mark pretended to puff up his pigeon chest. ‘I run a tight ship. No slacking on the job any more.'

Back in the old days, Leo had sometimes gone out with the maintenance team. There had been games of football in the vast empty rooms of Rose's properties. Long lunches at the nearest greasy spoon while they debated the finer points of Saturday's big match and even longer evenings in the pub drinking pints and playing pool. But he'd also learned how to plaster, rewire a circuit board and countless other real-world skills that had always come in handy when he was between commissions. Sometimes it seemed as if most of his adult life had been spent between commissions, like an actor who only rested.

Mark was now asking Lydia if she and Frank were coming over for Sunday lunch. There were children, Lydia's grandchildren; she was beaming as Mark showed her a photo on his phone. ‘Wait until I tell Rose that they're dressing up as suffragettes for Halloween,' she said as Leo turned away and started rummaging through the well-stocked fridge.

He'd grabbed everything he needed for a fried egg sandwich when inspiration struck. There might just be a way to start to make amends. With Rose. With Lydia. A tiny step in the right direction. ‘Mark, don't suppose you need a spare pair of hands on the work crew, do you?'

‘Maybe.' Mark cocked his head. ‘We are a couple of lads down. Are you up to putting in some hard graft or would the shock kill you?'

Lydia was leaning against the island, arms folded. ‘It might do,' she said tartly. ‘If the hangover doesn't get him first.'

‘Probably a bit rusty,' Leo admitted. ‘But I'm game, if you'll have me.'

He'd missed those months when slapping paint on a wall had been more enjoyable than applying it to a canvas and every Friday afternoon he'd got a little brown envelope full of banknotes that he'd earned.

‘All right. I'll give you a day's trial.' Mark glanced at Lydia, who nodded.

‘I don't care what you do with him,' she said. ‘Just get him out of my hair.'