After the Last Dance (20 page)

‘How horrible! Why would Ian want you do anything that felt like sitting on razorblades?' They'd both looked at Rose sitting there with a piece of scone half raised to her mouth and Mother had sent her off to her room to read a nice, improving book.

‘It will hurt,' Rose said, head turned so she could hide her blushing face in the pillow. ‘It will hurt and I don't want to get into trouble.'

‘It won't hurt,' Danny said and he was smiling and Rose didn't know why because she couldn't see that this was anything to smile about. ‘And you won't get into trouble. I'll take good care of you. Look at me, Rosie.'

She stared up at Danny. His smile might have been soft and kind but she knew how easily it could turn into a sneer. Rose loved him with everything that she was but she still knew he wouldn't be careful with her; he'd break her heart if she gave it to him. Besides, it was all too soon. She'd seen him fifteen times, not including today, and most of those times they'd only snatched kisses in doorways.

You couldn't go from a few kisses when no one was looking to letting a man make love to you. ‘I can't,' she said. ‘I'm sorry.'

He let go of her wrists and rolled off her. His face tightened and a muscle popped in his cheek, but he didn't say a word. He sat on the side of the bed and pulled out a packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket.

‘I've spoiled everything,' Rose said as she sat up and tried to tuck her blouse back in. She was sorry, sick to her stomach with it, but she also felt enormously relieved, as if she'd successfully evaded something ghastly like an exam or an unpleasant medical procedure.

‘Don't be silly, you haven't spoiled anything,' Danny said rather mechanically, but he lit a cigarette for her and said that he'd nip out for five minutes if she wanted to freshen up and that she needn't worry. ‘I'm not the sort of guy who'd force himself on a girl.'

After he left Rose discovered that someone had swapped Sylvia's peach Dupont silk negligee for Phyllis's lawn cotton nightdress that they'd nicknamed The Reverend Mother and she felt relieved all over again. There was absolutely no chance that Danny would be overcome by depraved lust at the sight of Rose swathed in the voluminous folds of Her Blessed Holiness.

Danny even grinned when he got back and saw Rose in bed, covers pulled all the way up to her chin. ‘Lighten up, Rosie,' he said, which she couldn't do because she was still alone in a hotel room with a man.

He'd gone down to the bar to get his hip flask filled with cherry brandy that the proprietor fermented in his potting shed. It was the nicest grown-up drink that Rose had tried and Danny didn't mind that she drank most of it and Rose didn't mind too much when he took off boots and socks and stripped off his shirt. She did avert her eyes when he reached for his belt buckle and gulped down the last of the brandy when he slipped into bed next to her in shorts and vest.

They lay there for a little while, Rose trying to screw up courage to suggest that they put the lumpy bolster between them, but she couldn't quite muster the necessary amount of guts and actually the brandy had had quite a soporific effect on her.

‘I'm so tired,' she murmured.

‘Me too.' He grazed her cheek with the softest of kisses, then rolled away, turned off the bedside table lamp and whatever tension she'd still been clinging to slowly melted away.

Rose could hear Danny's steady breaths in the dark, feel the warm nearness of him, but now it felt comforting and she wouldn't even have minded if he'd put his arm around her, let her snuggle against him, but sleep was tugging at her.

She dreamed that she was swimming in the sea. Waves lapping about her as she floated lazily on her back, shoals of tiny fish nipping at her toes.

Rose never wanted to open her eyes, to wake up, but then the water turned from warm to cold and her eyes snapped open and fear meant she couldn't move, couldn't open her mouth to scream as Danny loomed large over her in the dark, covers pulled back, that ridiculous passion-killer of a nightdress not doing anything to kill his passion because it had been pushed up and he was yanking down her knickers with careless hands.

Rose tried to kick him away but his legs were on hers. ‘What
are
you doing?' She had to squeeze the words out.

‘I need you, Rosie. You know you need me too,' he said. She hardly understood the thick, slurred words. ‘You know you do really.'

She would have jack-knifed off the bed if Danny hadn't been holding her down, forcing himself where she didn't want him. The wind stole right out of her so she couldn't even scream and had to bite down hard on her lip, but that tiny pain was no match for the terrible thing he was doing to her.

‘Stop it,' she said. ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!'

His hand closed over her mouth as her hands beat down on his back.

Get off me!
she wanted to say, scream it really, but the side of his hand was wedged into her mouth so Rose bit him. He snatched his hand away with a curse, but he didn't stop, even though she begged him to.

‘Please, Danny. I don't want this. Not like this. Please.'

‘It will only hurt this one time,' he said. ‘Let's just get it over and done with.'

Then his hand was over her mouth again and Rose tried to fight. She really did. Hands clawing, scratching, punching at him but no matter that she used every ounce of strength she possessed, she was no match for the hard, heavy weight of him. He held her down and Rose had never felt so small and weak and useless as he lay on top of her and stabbed that thing of his into her again and again.

Now Rose knew what it meant to be ruined. She would never be right again after this. Could never imagine that the pain would go away and she'd feel like she used to.

‘I love you, Rosie. I love you.' Danny was panting and just when she thought she'd got used to the pain, could breathe around it, he was moving in her faster, even harder and she didn't even want him to stop but to keep going until it was done. Over. Finished.

Then it ended with a choked cry and thank God, he was taking it out of her, splattering her stomach with his seed, then he let her go, got off her, so Rose could scrub at the mess he'd made with Phyllis's nightgown, which she was going to burn the first chance she got.

The bed shifted as Danny stood up. Rose heard the chink of china, a splash of water in the unfamiliar room, then his soft footsteps coming back to the bed, to stand over her.

‘Go away,' she said.

‘Please don't be like that, Rosie. Don't you love me any more?'

‘No, I don't,' Rose said in a hard voice, but she found that she couldn't move. She was no longer sure that her body was hers – that it would do the things she asked of it.

‘Poor baby. What a mess I've made of my beautiful girl.' It wasn't right that he could sound like that after what he'd done. He had a flannel in his hand, came towards her, eyes intent.

Rose managed to sit up and hold out an imperious hand. ‘Give it to me,' she demanded. ‘Turn your back. You're not to look at me any more.'

It was brave of her to talk like that now that she knew what he was capable of, but he nodded, and passed her the wet cloth, careful not to touch her. Rose waited until he was meekly staring at a muddy reproduction of
The Blue Boy
on the opposite wall before she slowly peeled back the nightdress.

She still hurt, smarted and stung terribly down there, but she hadn't expected the streaks of blood on her inner thighs. Some already dried to rust, some still fresh and red. She clumsily stood up to mop the blood away, scrub furiously at marks that wouldn't shift because they were bruises that hadn't had time to blossom. Then she supposed she was clean but she didn't feel it and she couldn't stop the tears that suddenly streamed down her cheeks. She sniffed, pinched her nose, but it was no good.

‘Oh, princess, please don't cry.' Before she could tell Danny he wasn't to turn around, that she loathed him beyond all measure, he sat down on the edge of the bed. Pulled her stiff body towards him and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, as if he could stop every tear. ‘Please don't.'

Rose didn't even struggle, but held herself very still. ‘You've spoiled it all and I hate you now,' she hiccupped. ‘I can't stand to be near you.'

‘You don't really hate me, Rosie,' he promised. ‘But you can't lead a guy on, let him kiss you, be as beautiful as you are and not expect him to take a few liberties.'

‘That wasn't a few…'

‘I said I wouldn't get you into trouble and I didn't. Next time, it will be better, I promise you,' Danny said, and he tried to stroke her hair, but she flinched away from him. She knew what those hands of his could do now.

‘There will never be a next time,' Rose told him. ‘Because there is no possible way
that
could ever get better. Even if I did lead you on, what you did, it was still wrong.'

‘It's not wrong. We just started the honeymoon early, that's all,' he said and he was grinning now, even dared to nudge her as if Rose found it funny too.

‘I don't know how we could have started the honeymoon early when we're not married. Not even engaged,' she reminded him, and she wanted to sound icy and dignified but she was still sniffling. ‘I think I might have remembered if we'd got engaged, and even if we had, I'd still hate you. As a matter of fact, I don't want to have anything more to do with you.'

She got off the bed, her movements jerky and God, that pain in the heart of her, where he'd defiled her.

Rose turned her back on Danny, snatched up her clothes from where she'd draped them over the chair and started to get dressed, the nightgown shielding her from his gaze, though it was too late for that now.

Danny had seen her naked, he'd seen her utterly helpless and Rose thought that maybe that might be the worst thing of all.

‘Rosie, you're being a brat,' he said cajolingly. ‘Let's get back into bed. It's late. You're not going anywhere.'

Rose ignored him and as she buttoned up her blouse she felt a new resolve, a sense of certainty that she'd never had before. She would never let Danny, anyone, treat her like that again. As if her thoughts and feelings didn't matter. As if she didn't matter.

‘I'm going back to London,' she said. ‘I'm going home.'

‘Don't be silly. It's half past one in the morning.'

‘I don't care! I don't want to spend even one single second longer in your company.' Rose wished her words were bullets, but she eyed Danny warily as he rose from the bed.

‘Rosie, sweetheart,' he drawled in that dark voice, which had done for her. ‘Come on. Don't be like this.'

Later, she'd be rather proud that she didn't back away as he came towards her.

‘If you come any closer, I swear to God, I'll scream the place down,' she warned him in a low voice that stopped Danny in his tracks and he stood there looking hurt and confused as if he were the injured party as Rose stuffed the last of her things in her case.

She'd be even prouder that when she took off the ring that he'd put on her finger she didn't throw it at him in a silly, meaningless act of petulance but placed it on the dressing table next to the chipped jug. Then she walked out of the room. Out of his life. Leaving all her childish hopes and dreams behind her.

Jane and Leo spent Saturday like tourists again. They took a boat from Westminster to Greenwich, then walked along the river until Leo realised that Jane was rigid with cold, too frozen to even shiver. ‘I didn't really pack for winter in London,' she said and when Leo took her into a chain store and all but forced her into a sensible, padded coat, he thought that she might cry.

‘What fresh hell is this?' she asked each time she caught sight of her reflection in a shop window and each time, she hit him on the arm when he laughed.

Leo had thought that pretending to be the people that they'd pretended to be in Vegas wouldn't work. That it was just trying to plug a gaping hole with wadded-up tissue paper, but both of them were so good at pretending that actually it worked just fine.

On Sunday, they lunched with Rose and George at Bluebird in Chelsea. Rose and George had been lunching there every other Sunday for years, so Lydia and Frank could have Sunday lunch with their family.

A steady procession of diners and staff, even an ancient and grizzled kitchen porter, furtively scurried over to pay tribute while George kept the three of them entertained with tales from past Sunday lunches. ‘She was so fabulously drunk, wasn't she, Rose? After she'd taken off most of her clothes, she then slid off her chair, very gracefully, and fell asleep under the table.'

Rose was in such an evidently good mood that Leo hoped to take advantage of it. But whenever he put down his cutlery, opened his mouth to start apologising, trying to explain, Jane laid a hand on his leg. Once she even kicked him, as if to say,
Not
here. Not yet
.

Jane didn't kick him when Leo offered to get the bill, though Rose raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you sure you can afford it?'

‘Bad form, Rose,' George scolded.

‘No such thing as a free lunch,' she replied, with a smile that was all lipstick and teeth and quintessentially Rose. ‘Right, Leo?'

‘Right,' he agreed. ‘But if there's anything you need, you only have to say.'

‘What else could I possibly need from you?' Rose asked and Jane gave him an encouraging smile, which was nice of her but not much practical help.

‘I don't know.' He'd been really good, only had one lager with lunch, but now Leo wished he'd had more. ‘Well, you… the thing is, I've been out with the maintenance crew a couple of times last week. Don't know if Mark mentioned it. He's down a few men and I thought that I could help out there like I used to if that's all right with you. I want to be useful while I'm here. Help out with anything you need doing. ‘

‘I get the general drift,' Rose said and her eyebrows shot up again as the bill arrived and Leo peeled some notes off the Vegas rolls that he'd had changed into pounds.

It took a long time to leave the restaurant. So many people who wanted to waylay Rose. To take her hand, kiss her cheek, to share a story, as if Rose wouldn't be coming back, though she'd be back in a fortnight. Of course she would, Leo thought, as he watched her walk ahead of him and introduce Jane to the coat check girl. It was ludicrous to think that Rose wouldn't be here two Sundays from now. That he could go away again, come back a year, two years, even five years later, and Rose wouldn't be having Sunday lunch with George, every other week, at Bluebird. Even he as willed it, he knew it couldn't be true and for the first time since he'd got back Leo felt the loss of Rose, even though she wasn't yet gone.

‘Goodness, Leo. I'd forgotten how you sulk when you don't get your own way,' Rose said crisply, when he walked through the door that George was holding open for him. ‘Very well. I'm doing my first site visit of a new property tomorrow; you can tag along, if you want.'

 

The next morning, Jane waved Leo off to work, then took a taxi across London to Hatton Garden.

It had been a while but eventually she found the nondescript black door she was looking for and pressed the buzzer. Then she climbed up three flights of stairs to another door and another buzzer, which led to the one-room office of Solly Garfinkel, who paid the best prices in London for the baubles that rich men bought their women.

‘Long time, no see,' he said to Jane by way of a greeting.

‘About four years, isn't it?' she replied and now that they were done with the formal greetings, Solly leaned back in his big swivel chair.

‘What have you got for me, then?'

One by one, on the piece of black velvet that Solly unrolled onto his messy desk, Jane placed her engagement ring, earrings, wedding tiara, a couple of cocktail rings, a bracelet and a prissy necklace Andrew had bought her strung with sapphire and pink diamond flowers that she'd never liked. Then Solly picked up his loupe and bent his head to scrutinise the stones.

They settled on three hundred thousand pounds for the lot, most of it for her art deco engagement ring. Usually Jane haggled, Solly expected it, but this time she simply produced the certificates of authentication. Then she turned round while Solly opened the safe underneath the desk and when he told her that she could turn back, there were fifteen stacks of twenty-pound notes on the table.

It wasn't much, Jane thought, as she sat in the back of another cab with the money in a carrier bag that Solly had given her. Not for the three years she'd spent with Andrew when she'd turned down the opportunity to spend time with much richer men because she had her eye on long-term profits rather than short-term gains. Yes, there were lots of other gifts Jane could have sold if they weren't sitting in Andrew's Bay Area house, if Jackie hadn't already packaged them up and sent them to charity. But three hundred thousand pounds was not a good deal, especially as these were her prime years. Jane wasn't going to look much better than this.

The disquieting thoughts didn't stop until Jane was standing fifty metres below ground in a vault underneath a private bank in Knightsbridge with her safety deposit box waiting for her on a metal table.

Before she opened the box with an eight-digit pin code, Jane's heart always fluttered unpleasantly then started beating faster than it should. But when she opened the box it was just as she'd left it. An envelope containing her old birth certificate that Charles had managed to track down, her change-of-name papers. A couple of uncut diamonds that looked like tiny, dull pebbles. A few pieces of jewellery Solly didn't want, to which she'd add her tiara, because Solly had said that there wasn't much demand for tiaras.

And then there were the bundles of cash and a piece of paper with her running tally on it: six hundred and forty thousand pounds, give or take. Altogether she had just under a million in cash – not that a million went very far these days.

Charles would despair of her. He'd shake his head and sigh and say that her safety deposit box was no different to an old lady stuffing her life savings under her mattress, but Jane liked her assets where she could access them. Touch them. Know that they were solid and real.

As real as they'd been that Thursday evening long, long ago when Charles had got home from work and she'd presented him with that grubby wad of money. He didn't snatch it away for board and lodging, didn't ask where it had come from, didn't scream at her for wearing four twenty-pound notes down to almost pulp with her own sweat. He simply sat down and explained what he did for a living.

Charles was the only ethical investment banker in London. He took his clients' money and refused to put it to work anywhere that it might fund weaponry, drugs, child labour, sex trafficking; the list of amoral activities was endless, though Charles had laughed wryly and said that having principles narrowed his rate of return considerably.

He was the only person Jane had ever trusted. She gave him all her money, apart from those few ruined notes, and he doubled it, then doubled it again. She used it to replace the teeth that had been knocked out. To straighten and reshape the nose that had been broken but still looked like her mam's nose.

Jane touched her nose now. It didn't look like her mam's nose any more. It was her nose. But she didn't want to think about her mam, or Charles, or any of her ghosts.

She picked up one of the stacks and, just like that, the noise in her head stopped. This was her ultimate exit strategy. No matter how bad things got or how uncertain the future, if you had cash and lots of it, you'd always be able to escape at a moment's notice, to take care of yourself. And if she ever needed any more justification of why she did the things she did, it was the four twenty-pound notes in a white envelope. They were worn so thin that the silver security thread was about the only thing holding them together. There were still smears of blood on them.

The past held you back – you had to let it go, but it did you no good to erase it completely, Jane thought, as she packed everything away in the metal box. She still had what was left of her half of the Vegas money: just over seven thousand pounds, which she stuffed into her handbag for incidentals. Then she closed the lid. It made a satisfying clunk like a full stop. The jewellery was gone, the money banked; there was a neat line through Andrew's name. No point in regretting what might have been.

Her last appointment of the day was with her lawyer. Charles had introduced them when Jane had needed new documents and above all else, utter discretion. Mr Whipple operated within the confines of the law, but the confines of the law were full of shadows.

She was always scared she might bump into Charles, so she never saw Mr Whipple in his wood-panelled offices in Chancery Lane. They met in a hotel lobby, tucked themselves away in a quiet corner. Mr Whipple was tall and thin and grey (‘like a character from a Dickens novel', Charles had said) and he drank milky tea and made notes in a crabbed hand in a leather-bound notebook.

Mr Whipple was also very encouraging. She and Leo hadn't signed a pre-nup and though Nevada was a community property state, that only applied to assets acquired after the marriage. It was doubtful that Leo and whatever shady lawyer he could afford would ever be able to track down Jane's safety deposit boxes or the deeds to her Primrose Hill garden flat or the New York apartment that she rented out (both of them goodbye gifts she'd negotiated from former lovers who no longer had any use for her), as they were owned by a company whose office was a PO Box in the Cayman Islands. Mr Whipple had been quite adamant about that at the time.

He also assured Jane that unless Leo was named and specifically excluded from Rose's will, he had good grounds to make a claim on her estate. Even if he was cast out without a penny, there were always loopholes that Mr Whipple could wriggle through like a circus contortionist.

‘But let's worry about that as and when,' he said smoothly. ‘In the meantime, one hopes that Miss Beaumont continues to enjoy life for, say, at least another six months, do you think?'

Jane shrugged. ‘Possibly. I'm not sure.'

‘But you'll need to stay married until after probate has been granted. You can still contest the will up to six months after that, so that's something to keep in mind.'

‘Hopefully it won't come to that, though,' Jane said. ‘Having to contest the will. Rose absolutely dotes on Leo.'

Or she would, by the time Jane was done.

Yes, all in all, it had been a day profitably spent.