After the Last Dance (19 page)

‘I don't want to lie to Rose any more. I'm sick of lying to everyone, myself included,' Leo said, even though it was nice to pretend that Jane had picked him, chosen him.

‘But it's not a lie. We are married and I just thought, hoped, that we could go back to those two people that we were when we first met,' Jane suggested.

‘All those days ago?'

‘Feels like years ago!' Jane traced the length of his middle finger slowly and Leo could feel his cock hardening just from that fleeting gesture. He was a hopeless case. ‘Before we got married. When we sat in that bar. You, the charming stranger, and me, the damsel in distress.'

‘Was I really that charming?' Leo's eyes felt so heavy-lidded that he was amazed he could still see out of them.

‘You were devastating,' Jane told him. ‘If I hadn't just been jilted and if we'd been somewhere more private, I think you could have had me naked in about five minutes.'

She was still stroking his middle finger up and down, slowly. So slowly. ‘I think you're being too flattering,' Leo said and this game he knew how to play. ‘Ten minutes probably. Ten minutes to get you naked, fifteen minutes to get you wet, twenty minutes to have you begging for it.' Leo laughed when Jane snatched her hands away and put her finger to better use by wagging at it him, but she was laughing too. ‘Oh, Jane, Jane, Jane, please stop trying to play me, it's not going to work any more.'

The problem was that when she played him it was so much fun, and though Jane said that their new détente didn't extend to her getting naked for him, they walked back to the house hand in hand. They were just in time to catch Rose as she came back from her night out with his mother.

Rose looked tired, a little sad, and maybe it wasn't the right time, but Leo had to try.

Jane got there first. ‘Did you have a nice time with Linda? Dinner and a show, wasn't it? What did you see, anything good?'

Good manners took precedence with Rose. ‘A revival of
Anything Goes
. We weren't in the mood for anything too challenging,' she said and as she started to walk up the stairs, with the two of them trailing in her wake, her steps were slow and laboured. So different from how she'd marched along this morning. But it was late. She'd gone to the office and his mother was always hard work; no wonder Rose was exhausted.

It was apparent that Rose needed all her breath for the climb up two flights of stairs but when they'd reached the top and were about to go their separate ways, Jane touched Rose's arm. She was so much braver than Leo was.

‘We're both so sorry about last night. I'm sure you must have heard me screeching like a Billingsgate fishwife,' Jane said, getting straight down to it. ‘When Leo comes home in that state, it's how I tend to react.'

Rose's smile was wintry at best. ‘And yet you still married him.'

Jane squeezed Leo's hand. ‘I had drunk rather a lot of champagne,' she said as if she was confessing to a terrible crime, and a miracle happened. Rose grinned. It took fifty years, even sixty years, off her. She looked younger than Jane, more wicked than Leo, in that split second.

‘If I hadn't drunk as much champagne as I have, then made some very questionable decisions as a result, I would have ended up leading a very boring, very quiet life,' she said.

‘I am sorry.' Leo couldn't say any more than that, no matter how much he wanted to. There were things he didn't want Jane to know, some things he wasn't ready to remember himself.

Jane tucked her arm into Leo's. He thought about putting an arm round her shoulder but decided against it. ‘We had a fight. Not our first. Not our last and it's not the end of the world, but if you're fed up with us then we can easily stay in a hotel.' Jane said.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' Rose snapped. That she wasn't too tired to be annoyed had to be a good thing. ‘Of course you must both stay here. It's a big enough house, but next time you feel the need to have a row maybe you can wait until you're off the premises.'

And with that, Rose tottered off down the corridor without even wishing them goodnight.

 

If King's Cross station had heaved with people that September day when Rose first stepped off the train, it was nothing to Paddington on that Friday afternoon. The khaki and navy blue forces had swelled in number and were now converging with office and shop workers leaving the dreary nine to five behind them until Monday morning.

It was all Rose could do not to get swallowed up in the crowd's slipstream, but then she saw Danny. Even in a seething mass of people, she'd always be able to spot him. He saw her too, waved and smiled. If Rose got lost in his kisses then his smile always found her again.

A tiny pocket opened up, big enough for Rose to hurl herself into Danny's arms. Her feet left the ground as he picked her up and spun her round then set her down again.

‘How did you get even more beautiful since I last saw you?' Nobody at MGM could have come up with a better line.

‘I missed you,' Rose said because that was all that she could say. ‘I've missed you so much.'

‘Missed you too, Rosie.' He put an arm round her shoulders to guide Rose through the crowd, which had receded to a distant place because all she could see was Danny. The tiny cut where he must have nicked himself shaving, the tender back of his neck; that soft, vulnerable space between the collar of his flying jacket and the brutally shaved hair at his nape, and his eyes all crinkled up and sparkling every time he glanced down at her.

There were no spare seats on the train and they had to wedge themselves into a tiny gap in a packed corridor. Danny kept his arm round Rose and fed her chocolate and stole tiny kisses that she was happy to give.

They got off the train at Henley-on-Thames. ‘I booked a room,' he told Rose. She'd been feeling so cosy, so cherished, but now panic knifed through her. She tried not to let it show but she could never hide anything from Danny. ‘No need to look so frightened, Rosie. Everything will be all right.'

‘You mustn't think I'm like that and you're not to get angry with me but…' It was hard to talk about these things, even with Sylvia, much less with Danny who was the one who wanted to do those things to her. Rose couldn't help thinking of Prudence and Patience's father and how he was very fond of saying in his sermons that ‘our ability not to give in to our basest impulses is what raises us above the animals and the savages'. ‘I don't want to be a savage!'

‘I've never seen a savage wear red lipstick.' He was laughing at her but when Rose pouted, his expression softened. ‘I got you a little present, but don't be getting any fancy ideas. Not yet anyway.'

‘What sort of fancy ideas?' He didn't answer but slipped a ring on the third finger of her left hand. It was too big. Rose had to make a fist to stop it sliding off. ‘Oh…'

Danny playfully cuffed her chin. ‘No fancy ideas, I said. It's just a cheap ring from Woolworths but after the war… Well, let's see what happens at the end of the war.'

He promised everything, but gave her nothing – only a ring that Rose worried with her fingers as they walked the dusky streets away from the station and towards the river.

The hotel had seen grander days. The carpet and curtains were shabby and wearing thin, paintwork scraped, floral wallpaper faded. There was a collective lowering of newspapers in the lounge as Rose stood at the reception desk with a weak smile, clutching Sylvia's crocodile attaché case as Danny signed them in as Mr and Mrs Smith.

The room,
their
room, ‘the nicest one in the house' according to the pimply-faced youth who took up their luggage and was rewarded with sixpence and a bar of chocolate from Danny, looked out onto the Thames. The water rippled darkly outside the window before Rose pulled down the blackout blind, then closed the curtains.

Danny turned on the light and the bed and its blue candlewick cover was all she could see. She averted her eyes to the pretty Delftware jug and basin perched on the dressing table. The lip of the jug was chipped. Danny sighed. ‘Let's go and get something to eat.'

‘Not downstairs. All those old ladies twittered when we walked in.' If they went out, left the hotel, then it wouldn't be a simple and quick matter to finish their meal and come back upstairs to a room with a bed in it.

Danny sighed again but they soon found a little pub that served food and after she managed to force down a couple of pink gins Rose felt better. Her left hand was still clenched so the ring wouldn't fall off but she could smile and nod and listen as Danny told her what it was like to fly at night over the unfamiliar British fields and valleys. Sometimes, he said, he wanted to keep on flying until he ran out of sky.

They'd never spent so long in each other's company with nothing to do but simply talk. Not that Rose had much to say because all she could think about was that bed and the dry words in the forbidden books in her father's study. It wasn't until they were served their steak and kidney pudding, which was more kidney than steak and more gristle than kidney, that she was able to look at him properly. Not just the individual parts, but the whole of him.

He had shadows around his eyes as dark as bruises, his beautiful grin had lost a little of its exuberance and there was the faintest tremor in his hands each time he lit a cigarette. ‘Oh, but you're not all right, are you?' Rose exclaimed. She pushed away her plate, her food only picked at, so she could lift one of Danny's hands and hold it to her face. He let her, eyes watchful and wary. ‘Please, won't you tell me what's wrong?'

‘Nothing you need worry about, princess.'

‘I'm not a princess. I don't break that easily.' The girl she'd been when she'd first jumped down from the train at King's Cross and set her hat at the first two GIs she'd found had grown up an awful lot. Rose could take whatever Danny had to give. She was sure of it.

‘I'm just tired,' he said, when she wouldn't let go of his hand. ‘The last couple of months, they've been intense.'

The thought of a tin box that could suddenly transport itself into the air always seemed fantastical to Rose but to climb into one night after night, to steal through dark skies, across the sea and over enemy territory took a foolhardy bravery that she couldn't comprehend.

‘Don't you get scared? I would. I'd be so frightened,' she said, and he smiled faintly and held her hand instead of her holding his.

‘The funny thing about fear is that a fella can find himself doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get a taste of it. Like going on the big rollercoaster at Coney Island even though you know you're going to lose your lunch,' Danny said and Rose nodded. When she heard the whine of the siren and she started running for the nearest shelter, often caught up in a crowd, the ARP wardens shouting, sometimes she wanted to stop running and simply stand in the middle of the street, arms raised, fists clenched, and dare the bombs to find her. ‘I guess I am a little crazy. A guy who's in full possession of his faculties isn't going to sign up for the Air Corps. You'd try your luck at a safe job in a nice, warm office.'

‘You'd be miserable stuck in an office,' Rose said. Even sitting holding hands with her, he was restless. It wasn't just his foot tapping on the floor or how he absentmindedly stroked a spot on her wrist that seemed extraordinarily sensitive to his touch; even his skin seemed to hum as if the blood that flowed underneath was fizzing. ‘You know you would.'

‘If a crew survive twenty-five missions, then they're done,' Danny said quietly. ‘They go back to the States and sell war bonds.'

Rose looked at the thin silver-coloured ring he'd put on her finger with no suggestion that it might mean anything more than a trick to fool a suspicious hotel landlady. ‘How many missions have you completed?' She refused to look at him even when he took her chin between thumb and forefinger and tried to turn her to face him.

‘Twenty-five,' he said. ‘Twenty-five last week.'

Twenty-five successful missions meant he'd cheated death a staggering twenty-five times. He was alive, sitting next to her, solid and real. That was a good thing, and the purple spots under his eyes and his trembling hands told her that maybe not all of his crew had been as lucky.

‘Your family must be thrilled that you'll be going home.' Rose tried to find a plucky smile. ‘When do you ship back?'

‘Wednesday.'

‘That's nice. How long before you dock in New York?' She stared down at the food she'd barely eaten. The flaccid suet sponge and the grey gristle on her plate made Rose feel bilious.

‘No idea, because I told the big cheeses that they could ship me off home, but I'd just jump overboard and swim back to Blighty. That's what you guys call it, isn't it?'

Rose did look at Danny then, her eyes glassy, bottom lip quivering so she had to bite it to keep it still. ‘Don't make jokes like that.'

‘No joke. It takes time to train a pilot and the rookies that are showing up with their wings are useless,' Danny said hotly as if this wasn't the first time he'd presented this argument. ‘I'll do more good in the air than back home selling war bonds.'

‘Don't you care that you might die?'

‘Of course I do.' He brushed her words away with an impatient hand. ‘But I have to believe that every bomb we drop, every plane of theirs we take out, brings us a little bit closer to ending this damn war, pardon my French.'

‘That's all very well, but you've done your bit. That should be enough.' There was no choice – she'd much rather have Danny safe with thousands of miles separating them than at an airbase a train ride away. Especially if he could climb into his stupid plane at that stupid airbase and never be seen again. ‘No one would blame you for going home.'

‘Don't paint me as some kind of hero. I'm not. Sure, I want to stick it to Jerry, but I tell you something, Rosie, I never feel half as alive as I do when I'm flying. It's a kick, a buzz. Ain't nothing else like it.'

Suddenly she was angry with him. That he could turn her heart over and right side up again simply because he thought it was such a wheeze to nuzzle up to death, bop it on the nose and dash away in the nick of time. ‘Well, isn't that just
swell
for you.' Her American accent was Hollywood-ready. ‘Don't you have any compassion for the people who are desperately waiting for you to come home safely?'

She meant his family in New York, whom she knew nothing about other than they lived in New York, but mostly she meant…

‘Do you worry about me, then, princess?' They weren't holding hands any more but were knee-to-knee, nose-to-nose. Danny was looking straight at her as if he knew that there were many nights that she lay in bed next to Sylvia and counted the planes she heard overhead flying home and prayed that he was in one of them.

‘No,' she said mutinously. ‘I hardly think about you at all.'

‘That's not fair when the only other thing that gives me that same kick as flying is when I'm kissing you,' Danny said and in the busy bar, not caring about the couple at the other table who'd been leaning in close so they didn't miss a single word, he kissed her.

It seemed to Rose as if he never stopped kissing her, though she supposed he must have at some point because they were back in the room. She'd been scared of ending up lying on the candlewick bedspread; now she couldn't think of anywhere on earth she'd rather be.

Kissing on a bed, pinned underneath him, her tweed skirt rucked up so high that she could feel the scratch of his wool trousers against the soft, untouched skin above her stocking tops, was an entirely new kind of terror.

His hand, which had been restlessly plucking at her blouse as if he couldn't bear the feel of cotton underneath his fingers, tugged it free of her skirt. The audacious slide of his palm against her ribs. Rose barely had time to gasp when his hand slid under her flimsy bra.

‘No!' she said. Her hands, which had been helplessly fisted in the candlewick bedspread, clutched his wrist. ‘No!'

He stopped kissing her and nuzzled a path down to her ear. ‘No?'

‘No,' she croaked. ‘I don't know. This… I wasn't… I didn't…'

‘You did, Rose, you did.' Danny wasn't kissing her any more. His hands stopped touching her face, her breast so she felt the lack of them, then they were back on her, pinning her wrists above her head. ‘You knew when I asked you to come away with me that we weren't going to spend the whole weekend holding hands. Didn't you?'

Of course she had. Those things that Sylvia had bought her were wrapped in a hankie and stuffed into a corner of her attaché case. She'd even read the instructions that came with the Volpar gels but the whole business had seemed so sordid it had been easier not to think about the mechanics of it all. Instead she'd thought about the heady feeling she got when Danny kissed her, when he was simply standing close to her.

‘I've never… I'm not… I don't want you to think that I'm one of those girls,' she whispered, as if there might be someone with their ear pressed against the door to take down her words and use them against her. ‘I couldn't bear it if you did.'

‘You're not one of those girls. You're my girl.' There were times when he knew exactly what to say. ‘Doesn't it feel good?'

If it felt so good then why was she so scared? Because for all the trappings she'd borrowed from Phyllis, Sylvia and Maggie, despite all the hard lessons she'd learnt since she'd been in London, there were an awful lot of times when she still felt like she hadn't grown up at all.

Also, it would hurt. Shirley had said so when she came back from her honeymoon in Southport. Not to Rose, but she'd whispered to Mother over tea that she'd ‘barely been able to walk the Promenade and then Ian wanted to do it again. It was like sitting on razorblades.'