After the Last Dance (28 page)

‘Thank you,' Rose said and then she took Jane's hand and through their gloved fingers gripped her with a strength Jane hadn't thought possible. ‘This last week or so, I see my loved ones all around me. At night, when I can't sleep, I can see them in the walls.'

Rose might be getting that misty, unfocused look again but her voice was clear, so it was hard to know how to respond. ‘Oh, well… it's probably just the new drugs you're on, darling.'

‘No, I think they're waiting for me. I thought I had more time than this. I would love to have a little bit more time. There are still so many loose ends to tie up.' Rose placed her other hand over their clasped fingers. ‘Still, I don't think I'll have to bother with Christmas cards this year. Having to write them out was always such a bore.'

It was a relief that they were back to being flippant. ‘You probably won't have to bother with buying Christmas presents either.'

‘Or eat Brussels sprouts. Never could stand them. They were the one thing that was in plentiful supply during the war.'

‘They're not so bad if you take off all the outer leaves and fry them with bacon,' Jane said and Rose wasn't so far gone that she couldn't give her an incredulous look. ‘Sometimes – not often, I admit it – I cook. Last year, before I met Leo of course, I cooked Christmas dinner for my boyfriend's family.' Jane laughed as she remembered it. ‘They didn't really understand the concept of Christmas dinner. Kept saying it was too soon after Thanksgiving to have turkey again,' she told Rose. ‘Jackie, Andrew's mother, said that next year she'd give me her baked ham recipe and I could make that instead. I dodged a bullet there. Are you too cold, darling? Shall we go in now?'

Rose was staring at her incredulously again. ‘Gosh, you really are an odd duck,' she said as if she were seventy years younger and she wasn't talking to Jane but one of those ghosts of hers that lived in the walls.

Then, thank God, Leo was coming through the gate. ‘I hope you two aren't talking about me,' he said cheerfully. ‘Frank gave me a lift to the office. I've got everything you asked for and Liddy says it's too cold and you have to come in now.'

 

Rose sat on a wooden chair clutching a mug of tea that tasted faintly of Brussels sprouts as a lady from the WRVS asked her questions, each one punctuated with the word ‘dear'.

‘Do you have an address for Phyllis Carfax's next of kin, dear?'

‘Do you know when Magda Novotny arrived in England? Is that the correct spelling of her surname, dear?'

‘Is it Sylvia or Sylvie, dear?'

‘Do you have your rent book, dear?'

Then she sent Rose off to the other end of the church hall to talk to an Information Officer. There were more questions, forms to be filled in, a card handed over with the address of the mortuary because Maggie – they kept calling her Magda even though she was Maggie – didn't have any relatives to identify her body.

‘You can't expect her to do that,' Edward said harshly. ‘She's barely eighteen.'

Rose was glad Edward knew the truth about her age so that she didn't have to lie to him too. She was fed up with lying. ‘I don't mind,' she said. ‘I couldn't bear the thought of Maggie… I want to do it.'

They got a lift to the New Middlesex Hospital from one of the ambulance crews and waited in a corridor until nine o'clock when the mortuary office opened. Rose handed over the card and they were sent back outside to wait.

‘I'm so late for work,' she said to Edward. ‘And I still need to go home to change.'

She kept forgetting that there was no home to go back to, no clothes to change into, no one to yell at her to make them a cup of tea too.

‘It doesn't matter,' Edward said. His fair hair was soot-blackened. There was also soot and brick dust all over his uniform and his cap had got lost in the mêlée. Edward was very important so he probably needed to go to work too even though it was a Saturday, but he shook his head when Rose pointed that out. ‘None of that matters today.'

Eventually Rose's name was called by a young woman in a tweed suit who led them down several flights of stairs, then through a labyrinthine maze of passages until they came to the door with a handmade sign pinned to it:
MORTUARY
.

The woman was talking to her. ‘I'll try to make this as quick and painless as possible, but it was a very concentrated explosion. You need to prepare yourself.'

Rose tilted her chin and straightened her shoulders. ‘I'm absolutely fine,' she insisted, but was glad of Edward's hand resting on the small of her back as she walked through the door.

The room reminded her of the science laboratory at her old school. The same jars and phials arranged on shelves. There was even a blackboard and the peculiarly prickly yet flat smell of chemicals, but her school science lab had never had a large trolley in the middle of the room with a shrouded body on it.

Except it was too small to be a body and Rose stalled, but Edward flexed his fingers and pushed her forward on unsteady feet.

Then she stopped. ‘It looks too little to be Maggie…'

The woman consulted her clipboard. ‘Maggie? Magda Novotny?'

‘We call her Maggie. Called her Maggie.' Rose gestured at the covered figure. ‘She wasn't as tall as me, but she was bigger than that.'

She heard Edward suck in a breath. The woman stared fixedly at the papers in front of her. ‘It was a very concentrated explosion,' she repeated. She looked at Rose and raised her eyebrows. Rose stared back at her. ‘That is to say, not all the bodies are, um… intact.'

Rose thought of the wicker hamper sitting on what was left of the pavement. Thought again of Sylvia telling her about the tiny foot and couldn't prevent one sob escaping. She clamped her hand over her mouth.

‘Darling Rose, you don't have to do this,' Edward said, his hands coming up to rest on her shoulders, his fingers hard against her bones as if he was trying to pour his strength into her. ‘You don't have to be so brave.'

‘I don't think I'm being very brave.' She took a deep breath now. Remembered all the tiny kindnesses that Maggie had done her. All the mending, all those delicious things she'd miraculously produced from their tiny stove, all the good advice that she hadn't taken. This was her only chance to repay them. ‘I'm ready.'

The woman approached the table and gingerly took a corner of the sheet between thumb and forefinger so she could slowly peel it back to show just half of Maggie's face.

There was her dark wavy hair, imperious nose, but her lips weren't curved into the tiny smile she usually wore, and her eye was taped shut. Rose crept nearer and just peeking beneath the edge of the sheet she saw something red and livid and raw that made her turn away so she could press her face against Edward's shirt. He felt warm and solid.

‘Darling, is it Maggie?'

‘Yes,' she mumbled against filthy khaki cotton. ‘Can we go now?'

They retraced their steps, signed more forms, and only then were they were free to leave. To open the big double doors out onto a world that hurried by, quite unaware that something terrible had happened.

Rose clung to the railings that thronged the building. ‘I feel as if I should be crying but I can't.'

‘I don't think you have to cry if you don't feel like it,' Edward said. She still had his jacket around her shoulders and he fumbled in one of the pockets for his cigarette case and lighter. ‘It's the shock. It can play funny tricks on one.'

‘I should go to work now. Mrs Fisher is always telling me off for being late.' Rose took the cigarette that Edward proffered. ‘I don't want to get the sack.'

But she didn't go to work. Instead they walked. To Regent's Park, past the zoo all boarded up, through the Rose Garden and around the lake.

She and Edward counted the sandbags as they walked past Broadcasting House, stared at the paltry goods on display along Oxford Street, then worked their way through Mayfair until they arrived at his building.

It was a mansion block overlooking Green Park. ‘Very convenient to have Fortnum and Mason as my corner shop,' he joked heavily as Rose followed him up the marble stairs to his flat on the fourth floor. There was a lift but apparently it had been out of order for weeks.

Edward ushered her into the living room, which was quiet and uncluttered, apart from the crammed bookshelves and the art on the walls. Art that that didn't look like proper things like people or animals or landscapes.

Rose sat on a chesterfield, the tan leather worn in places because Edward was rich and the rich didn't seem to make such a fuss about things that were worn out, and watched him pour brandy into two tumblers.

‘I don't much like brandy,' she said.

‘You're in shock and you're going to drink it,' he said and he handed her the glass and sat down next to her.

Rose took a cautious sip. She supposed it was meant to taste warm and mellow but it was harsh in her mouth, though she liked the way she could feel it scorching a path down to her belly. ‘Do you think it took a long time? Do you think they suffered? That they lay there, in pain and frightened, waiting for someone to come and help them?'

Edward moved his hand nearer to where hers rested on the seat but didn't touch her. ‘I think it was instantaneous. That they were all asleep and never woke up.'

‘
Was
it a faulty gas line though?' That was another thing worrying at her. ‘If it was, why was the ARP warden there? Why was the place suddenly swarming with all those men in suits as we walked to the church hall?'

He shrugged helplessly. ‘I don't know, Rose. I'm sure, whether it was a gas line explosion or something else, that they simply used the protocols already in place.'

She wasn't satisfied with that either. ‘They shouldn't have even been there. We always go out dancing on Friday night after the Rainbow, always. They came home because it was my birthday today and I nagged Maggie about making me a birthday cake because we had enough sugar and eggs. What if it was the gas line? What if it was our oven? What if you hadn't asked me to dinner? What if —?'

‘For God's sake, Rose.' Edward drained the contents of his glass in an angry swallow. ‘You weren't there, they were. There is no rhyme or reason to it. Haven't you learned that by now?'

‘I only agreed to have dinner with you because I wanted to go to The Ritz and to ask you to help me find Danny.' Rose didn't know why she was doing this. Just because she felt numb was no reason to make Edward furious enough for both of them. ‘I was being selfish and spoiled. Worse, I've been rewarded for being selfish and spoiled because I'm sitting here drinking brandy and generally being alive and they're dead. Well, I don't call that fair!'

‘Will you just
shut up
?' Edward sounded as if he were in agony. As if he'd lain there with the dead and dying and waited in vain for someone to rescue him but when Rose turned to him, to apologise, she saw the damp track of tears on his face and before she could say anything, he reached for her.

She never expected Edward to kiss her.

Never expected that she would kiss him back.

Finally she felt something: that she was truly alive and in a body that moved and twisted and turned underneath someone else because Edward was so greedy. He demanded everything that she possibly had left to give and Rose gave gladly.

She'd never felt like this when Danny had kissed her. This mad, unrestrained urge that made her kiss Edward with a messy, graceless mouth and slide her hands under his shirt so she could scrabble and scratch at his back, all that warm skin just begging for her touch.

It was lust. Carnal lust. Debased. Immoral. All those words that Rose had never really understood until now on Edward's sofa as she writhed and moaned and gasped as he did absolutely maddening things to her with his mouth and fingers that Danny had never done.

Then Edward was inside her, hands still working on her, kissing her until the only thing Rose knew for certain was that she'd never felt this wonderful before. That Edward, of all people, could make her come completely undone and she hadn't even slipped off her shoes or unhooked her dress. That should have been enough to make her feel terrible but it didn't, not until Edward suddenly gripped her wrists and came into her with one last ferocious thrust. ‘I love you!' The words were wrenched out of him. ‘How I love you!'

‘Oh God! Get off of me!' She shoved at his immobile weight, pounded at the shoulders that she'd been clutching only moments before. ‘Get off me!'

Edward reared back so suddenly that he landed on the floor with a thud and such a dumbfounded expression that it almost made Rose laugh. But there was nothing to laugh about when his seed was trickling down her thighs and her dress was rucked up to her hips and her friends were dead.

‘Rose?' Edward was sitting on the floor and he'd been her ballast today, her sandbag, but now he looked just as lost as she was. She'd ripped the buttons off his shirt, they were scattered like loose change on the rug, and she could see the curve of his shoulder, the knobs of his collarbones, his skin so pale and vulnerable that it made her want to cry. ‘I know my timing's terrible, worse than terrible, but you must know that I love you. I think I've loved you from the first moment I saw you.'

He was flushed from their exertions and Rose was sure that if she looked closely enough she'd see the blood rushing through his veins, his heart beating to keep the blood pumping. Unless your heart had been blown right out of you and picked up by an ambulance worker and stuffed in a wicker hamper.

Edward must have taken her silence for encouragement, though Rose couldn't imagine why. He cleared his throat and tried to smile. ‘I know that right now you feel as if you might never be happy again, but you won't always feel that way.'

‘I don't want to be happy,' she said. ‘I have no right to be happy.'

‘But you do and, if you let me, I'd like to try… I love you.'

Rose stood up so she could look down at Edward sitting on the floor, clumsy and diminished. ‘Well, I don't love you,' she said. ‘I could never love you.'