After the Last Dance (32 page)

‘Haven't we moved past that whole “darling” crap?' Leo edged into the bathroom, closed the lid on the loo and sat down. ‘You called me Leo in the car. Don't even try to deny it.'

‘So I did.' Jane concentrated on easing off every last scrap of make-up. Maybe it was the hours spent listening to Rose tell her stories, take stock of her life, pulling and picking at the threads, tracing them back to that first stitch. Or seeing Charles again, which had upset her, unsettled her, made her remember too much, but Jane wanted to tell someone her stories too. But there would be consequences…

‘Leo,' she said deliberately, lingering over the two syllables. ‘Tell me more about the summers at Lullington Bay.'

‘What shall I tell you?' he asked.

‘Everything,' Jane said.

So Leo told her about being allowed to stay up late and lighting bonfires on the beach and toasting marshmallows while Rose told them stories about America. Of drive-ins and cowboys and driving out to the desert to watch rockets fly into space and a hundred other things that she knew would enthral two little boys.

While Jane's face was soaking in cream from a pot of magical ingredients that cost over a hundred pounds, they sat cross-legged on the bed and he told her how he'd lie on the floor of the sitting room at Lullington Bay with Rose's art books spread out before him and copy the pictures while Rose looked on approvingly. That she hadn't been quite so approving when he got older and would get drunk on cider with the lads from the village and then slope off with one of their sisters to the little lane behind the pub.

‘She didn't say much but you know what Rose is like. She can say plenty with just one look,' Leo said and he pursed his lips, flared his nostrils and narrowed his eyes but still didn't come close to approximating Rose's disapproval. ‘She'd leave condoms under my pillow. They had to be from Rose. No way were they from my mum.'

‘No, I can't imagine your mother going into a chemist to ask for a packet of Durex's finest,' Jane said. The thought of Linda, handbag clutched tightly in front of her, looking furtively about to make sure that none of the Rotary Club wives had spotted her, made Jane giggle and then she noticed that Leo wasn't laughing along. ‘Oh, darling… Leo, don't. Please don't.'

He was crying. Jane hated seeing people cry. Depending on the person, she could be sympathetic, stroking their hair and cooing platitudes, but now when she reached out a hand to gently touch Leo's shorn head, it was different. Leo was different. Oh God,
she
was different. How had that happened?

‘You have all these happy memories of Rose,' she told him softly. ‘That's a lot more than some people have.'

He didn't say anything but covered his face with his hands as he must have done when he was a little boy who liked to look for pirate ships and stay up late to toast marshmallows.

It was pure instinct to raise herself up on her knees and shuffle closer so she could put her arms around him, kiss the top of his bent head. ‘Please don't cry, Leo. You'll start me off too.'

He mumbled something but it was unintelligible through the sobs he was failing to hold back.

‘Come on. You have to stay strong for a little longer,' she said and he took a couple of deep breaths and when he raised his head, Jane wished he hadn't because he didn't even bother to try to hide his vulnerability.

‘I'm going to miss her,' he whispered. ‘I wish I'd become someone she could be proud of instead of wasting all these years fucking about. She had all this faith in me and I blew it.'

‘That doesn't matter. You've shown Rose who you could be and now you owe it to her to become that person.'

Jane was still holding him, foreheads almost touching. It felt very intimate, comforting someone. Not entirely unpleasant either.

‘It's not that easy to become someone else, though, is it?' Leo said quietly.

Jane couldn't help but smile. ‘Oh, it's much easier than you think,' she said. At that moment she was simply desperate to tell him her story, almost as much as she wanted to wipe the haunted look off his face.

It was easier, safer, to close the tiny gap that separated them and kiss him.

She kissed the next sob right out of his mouth and she kept on kissing him until Leo got the message that it was all right to kiss her back. He still looked like he might cry but that was only because Jane pulled back from him and peeled off her jumper and unclipped her bra. She was used to men looking like they might cry when she took her clothes off.

Leo stared at her face fixedly as if it was a superhuman effort of will not to stare at her breasts instead. ‘Why? Why now? I mean, Vegas doesn't count, we were both hammered.'

Jane shrugged and his eyes did drift down to her breasts then. She'd have been insulted if they hadn't. ‘Because I want to and because I think we both need to get out of our heads in a way that doesn't involve artificial stimulants.'

‘I can't even tell if you're playing me any more,' Leo muttered, even though Jane wasn't. At least she didn't think she was, but before she could contradict him he held up his hands. ‘Just so we're clear, I'm allowed to touch, aren't I? You're not going to smack me again?'

‘Only if that's what turns you on, darling,' she drawled and this might just have been about trying to put him out of his misery but the way Leo kept looking at her with hooded eyes, his tongue caught between his teeth, made Jane wonder if she was really doing this out of the goodness of her heart. ‘Come here and kiss me.'

Leo's kisses tasted of all the sweet things Jane had ever known: champagne and red velvet cake and pink spun sugar from the fair. She did smack him when he shaped her breasts and whispered, ‘I thought you said we weren't going to do anything that involved any artificial stimulants,' because they were all her. No implants. Just the fat sucked out of her arse to plump up what had barely been there. She was still mostly bones and edges and hard lines, but it seemed as if her flesh spilled voluptuously into Leo's reverent hands. He said he'd never felt anything so soft as her breasts and thighs and the tiny bulge of her belly as he rubbed his cheek against it.

Jane couldn't help but laugh even though sex was never a laughing matter. ‘You're tickling me,' she whispered.

‘Sorry,' he whispered back, although only the moon glinting through the window was witness to the two of them sprawled on the bed.

‘It's all right, it's a good kind of tickling,' she said and Leo, even as he had his hands full of her, gave her a suspicious, fearful look as if could actually hear the cogs whirring in her brain.

‘Oh no,' he murmured fiercely. ‘Don't even think it, Jane.'

‘But now I've thought it, I can't unthink it,' she reasoned. ‘Are you ticklish? I bet you are.'

Leo tried to hold her back with kisses but her hands were already skimming down his back, tugging his T-shirt out of the way to trace figures of eight with the tips of her fingers.

He squirmed away from her, but Jane let her touch dance against his rib cage and then under his arms. Leo was helpless as a baby as she sought out his secrets. Jane watched incredulously as he giggled and moaned and begged her to stop when she ran her fingertips along the soft skin of his forearms.

‘I think you needed to laugh even more than you needed to get laid,' she said as he batted her hands away and lay back panting. It was true. He was always joking, always smiling, but he never really laughed.

‘There's not been much to laugh about lately. And actually, now you mention it, I don't think I've ever seen you laugh. Not properly.'

Then it was Leo who comforted her, although Jane wasn't crying but wearing the same neutral expression that seemed to take an awful lot of effort these days. But still, Leo drew her closer so he could kiss the shadows away from her face.

Maybe sentimentality was contagious but it seemed to Jane that Leo healed every inch of her that he touched, his mouth a warm, wet, insistent thing as he travelled down her body. She wasn't so damaged or broken that she had to fake it (not all the time) and Leo was good at this. Really good, she thought, her eyes rolling back in her head, as he draped her legs over his shoulders and feasted on her.

It was no wonder all those women, all those other men's wives, had been so hot for him when he was so clever with his hands and his mouth, so generous with his attentions, so pleased that Jane was pleased with him that he let her go once and then twice, though strictly speaking it was his turn now. She twisted under him as he fucked her with his fingers and at the same time his tongue kept stroking over her again and again and again.

‘No. Stop. Stop,' she said when she could speak again and it didn't take much effort to coax him up the bed because he was so hard and needy for her. He sighed in relief when she grasped his cock in her hands and began to rub it gently.

‘You're so pretty, Leo,' she purred, her cheek brushing against his prick. ‘Is this all for me?'

‘You don't have to do that,' he said, reaching out for her, but Jane pulled away and stuck her tongue out at him.

‘I want to do this,' Jane insisted. ‘You just lie back and think of England.'

In the end, he gave up, and let her do God's work. Jane had certain smarts in this department too, had always got rave reviews, and she wasn't surprised that the things she did, both of them naked now, made him buck his hips and beg her to fuck him.

She'd barely got started, had only just lowered herself onto him, when he came undone. Coming and crying under her and she didn't despise him for being weak. This time, Jane understood. She stayed where she was, her flesh fluttering all around him as she licked his tears away.

‘Come on, Leo, this was meant to make you happy,' she sighed. ‘Why are you so scared to get happy?'

‘I don't know,' he said. Then he looked up at her. His face was still damp but he smiled. It was a shaky, watery smile but it was exactly what Jane wanted to see. ‘I don't usually come that quickly. Honestly. You can call some of my exes and they'll tell you I could go all night. Then they'll tell you that I'm insatiable.'

‘Darling, I'd already figured that out all by myself,' Jane said. Leo did laugh then and he was still half hard inside her, and got even harder when she dragged his hands up to her breasts.

‘Seriously though, are these real? They feel real.'

‘Oh!' She gasped as he worked one nipple between thumb and forefinger, pulled the other one into the wet heat of his mouth so she could hardly think. ‘I'm not sure that any of me is real,' Jane said, though she hadn't meant to.

‘This… right now, this is real,' Leo said and he sat up, his chest, skin so warm, flush to hers so he could kiss her again.

It was the first time Jane had told a man exactly what she liked, instead of pretending that everything they did was fine with her. Leo was very biddable. He gripped her wrists, held them tight behind her back because she needed that tiny hint of pain, as his mouth worked her breasts again, licking, tugging, sucking and eventually, to reward his efforts, Jane rose above him and slowly, inch by inch, took him inside her again. She wondered if Leo felt as if he was plunging underwater into oceans warmed by the sun too.

Then he seemed to instinctively know that a hint wasn't going to be enough and he flipped them so he was on top, Jane underneath and he rode her like that. His hips snapping against hers, her legs wrapped tight around him and she was almost
there,
needed one more deep thrust, one more filthy word whispered in her ear. She was straining towards something just out of reach, just beyond her grasp.

‘It's all right,' Leo said. ‘I've got you,' and he pushed her over the edge.

 

Every day the papers listed the foreign towns and cities, a sea away, which had been reclaimed by the Allied forces. It was hard to reconcile the pictures of women in headscarves, small children waving flags, all cheering as the tanks rumbled past, as a decent exchange for what had been lost.

When they liberated the concentration camps, those terrible places with ugly names, even Rose was shocked out of the torpor that had settled around her like a fine mist of perfume. She sat in a cinema with her hand to her mouth as she watched the newsreels. Impossible to believe that the sepulchral mountains of parchment-white skin and bones could have once been people. But they had been, and there was a collective disbelief that any one person, never mind whole nations, could be so evil.

It would have been easier to pretend that it hadn't happened, but Rose danced with men at Rainbow Corner who'd seen it first-hand. They were different from the other men who'd passed through on their way back home. There was a haunted quality to them; a certain desperation in the way they held Rose just a little too tightly.

Back in Kensington, Yves had put his fist through a wall in sheer helpless rage and Madeleine cried all the time. She cried as she peeled potatoes, tended her beloved vegetable patches and scrubbed the kitchen floor. She even cried in front of Edward when he visited, which he did quite often. He always arrived with something – flowers, a toy, once a bottle of red wine – and the sweetest, softest smile for Rose as if he were remembering the kisses they'd last shared, of touching every inch of her body. But on the day the papers were full of the liberation of Auschwitz and Madeleine was crying as she laid the table, he took Madeleine in his arms and kissed the top of her head.

‘They won't get away with this,' he told Madeleine in a clenched voice. ‘I promise you that.'

They hid the papers in the coal bucket so the little ones wouldn't see but when Thérèse woke up screaming three times in the night, Rose retrieved the newspapers and burnt them.

But there was so little time to mourn when there was so much to celebrate. The bombs had stopped falling and one Monday night at the end of April the blackout officially ended. The next day the papers reported that Hitler had committed suicide and suddenly, when it had been a grim reality for so long that Rose couldn't imagine life without it, the end of the war was inevitable.

It took just over a week and then it all stopped. Rose was at work and doing battle with the urn, which was on its last legs, when the BBC announced that the war was over. Everyone stopped talking. Even the anaemic sausages in the pan stopped spitting. ‘Can it really be true?' someone asked and then everyone cheered and a young lad leapt over the counter and tried to kiss Rose but she stamped on his foot. Mr Fisher was so swept up in the moment that he declared that tea and buns were on the house.

Rose had never seen anyone quite so tight-lipped and furious as Gladys Fisher as she watched her husband give away free buns to all and sundry. Then, while she was still reeling from the shock, he closed the café and opened the bottle of sherry he'd hidden away for that very day, that very moment. The pair of them got quite tipsy as they waltzed around the tables and chairs, and they told Rose to go home and that she could have tomorrow off too.

Tuesday, May the eighth, VE Day. All of them, the little ones as well, walked into town. Madeleine was still crying but she said that they were joyful tears and Yves and Jacques bought red, white and blue hats from a hawker standing outside the Royal Albert Hall and red, white and blue ribbons that the girls tied in their hair. They walked through Hyde Park and everyone they passed smiled and said hello and ‘isn't it wonderful news?'

They joined the crowds outside Buckingham Palace but they were packed in like sardines and a policeman said that the King and Queen wouldn't appear for hours and Rose was so worried that the children would get crushed that they ended up walking home and sat by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens to eat their sandwiches.

‘I don't want to go back,' Gisèle said in her heavily accented English to Rose as they made their way back to the house, the children dragging their heels and complaining that they were tired. ‘This isn't home, but home isn't home either.'

For Rose, home was Rainbow Corner; it was her anchor, her lodestone, but that night, as soon as she walked through the doors, she was gathered up and spilled back out onto the pavement.

She found herself arm in arm with a pair of sailors marching through the heaving streets to Trafalgar Square. There were flags everywhere, the lights blazing defiantly after all those years of darkness, and people, so many people. Clinging to lampposts, splashing through the fountains, on top of the stately lions that had kept guard throughout the war. Rose joined the end of a massive conga line and she laughed and cheered and sang ‘Pack Up Your Troubles' and made a good show of it, a newspaper man even took her photo, but she wondered why she had to pretend to be happy. Surely she should have simply
been
happy?

Later, as she walked towards Mayfair, she wondered if the triumph was worth all that they'd sacrificed? Maybe that was why victory felt like the end of a deathly dull party that had dragged on for far too long and now one was walking home through cold, empty streets knowing that there was no food in the larder, no money left to feed the meter.

But she wasn't walking home. She was going to Edward. There was every chance that he might be out drinking brandy and smoking cigars with his Whitehall buddies in a gentlemen's club, but he'd never yet let her down.

So Rose wasn't at all surprised to hear his footsteps coming towards her when she knocked on his door. She didn't think he'd been home long because he was still in his uniform, jacket unbuttoned, and he had that soft look he often had when he'd been drinking. ‘I was hoping to see you tonight,' he said and she stood there and delighted in the tremble in her legs, the way she suddenly found it hard to breathe.

Some nights, as soon as he closed the door behind her, Edward would tell her to take her clothes off in that precise, proper voice of his and he'd stand there and watch her as she made herself naked for him, but tonight he simply took her hand and led her to the sofa. ‘I have a bottle of champagne I've been saving – will you have a glass?'

Rose fussed with her hair, tugged down her skirt and fidgeted while Edward was in the kitchen. Her hand shook slightly as she took a whisky tumbler from him that was almost full to the brim.

‘I'm afraid my champagne glasses were yet another casualty of war,' he said as he sat down next to her. He was so serious tonight and Rose was all wrong-footed because usually, by now, he'd have kissed her at least.

Still, he watched her sip champagne as hungrily as he would kiss her. Despite all the things they'd done, Rose felt inexplicably shy. She was blushing as she put the glass down. ‘I thought the end of the war would mean something,' she said at last. ‘That it would make everything better, but it hasn't. Not at all.'

‘Well, it's not quite over yet. There's still the war in the Far East.'

‘But that's the Far East – it's awfully far away, otherwise they'd call it the Near East.'

They both smiled and the tension eased enough that Rose could toe off her shoes and tuck her legs up underneath her. She wasn't nervous now, but relaxed into Edward's intent gaze because he'd told her so many times that he loved to look at her. Not that he loved her, she didn't think he'd ever say that again, not now she'd explained matters, but it was comforting to know that on the outside she was still the same girl, fresh off the train, that he'd first met all those months ago at Rainbow Corner.

‘I'm glad you're here. Well, I'm always glad when you're here but there was something I wanted to tell you in person, not by letter,' Edward said casually as he removed his cufflinks and placed them on the end table. ‘I'm afraid I have to go away.'

‘Where are you going? You won't be gone long, will you?' Everyone had left her, but not Edward. He was meant to be constant. He was meant to be here whenever she needed him.

‘I'm going to Germany,' he said and instantly, her world hollowed out.

‘Why on earth would you want to go
there
?' Rose turned to look at Edward but, for once, he refused to meet her eye.

‘I have to tell you something,' he said woodenly though it couldn't be worse than him going to Germany, to be among those people. ‘It might come as a shock.'

‘What? What do you have to tell me?' she demanded.

He shrank back from her slightly. ‘I'm Jewish.' He actually flinched then as if he expected Rose to strike him, or turn away from him in disgust, though she had absolutely no inclination to do either of those things. ‘Or rather my mother is – was – so according to Judaic law and well, Hitler, that makes me Jewish too.'

The relief made Rose quite lightheaded. ‘Is that it? Goodness, for a moment you had me worried. Anyway, I thought your mother was American.'

‘Rose.' Edward slowly shook his head, fought back a smile. ‘The two things aren't mutually exclusive. Officially, her family left Russia in the middle of the last century to further their business interests. Unofficially they came to America to escape persecution. They did very well for themselves. My grandmother married a banker and somewhere along the way her history, her religion, the family that had been left behind in the shtetls, got erased. It's rather curious really – I've never set foot in a synagogue, quite happily eaten bacon and done whatever I pleased on the Sabbath, but lately being Jewish seems terribly important.'

Now Rose could understand why he'd spent all that money on buying up houses for what turned out to be seven Jewish refugees. But she couldn't understand why he'd want to leave her to go to
Germany
where those
bastards
had tried to wipe his people out of existence. ‘I think going there would be a dreadful mistake,' she said and she took his hand and tried to put everything she couldn't say into the way she laced her fingers through his. ‘I don't see how it would achieve anything. The war is over now.'

Edward disentangled their fingers, but didn't let go of her hand. ‘I was a lawyer before the war and I shall become a lawyer again. I'm going to find the people who were responsible for the concentration camps, for all that suffering, and make them confess their crimes. Put them on trial. Bear witness for their victims. They have to be held accountable.'

‘Edward, they're not people! They're animals.'

‘No! They are people. If we think of them as animals then we allow them to abrogate all responsibility for what they did. We forgive them for just blindly following orders.' Even though he was keeping it tightly wound like cotton on a reel, Rose could feel his anger. ‘Justice must be served.'

Rose knew, with a dull, resigned certainty, that when he came back, he wouldn't be the same. He'd be fundamentally altered. She could bear to lose Edward – her sweet, serious Edward – too. The thought made her ache. ‘I wish there were a way I could change your mind.'

Edward patted her arm to signal that he couldn't take her wishes into account. ‘While I'm gone, I need you to do something for me,' he said. ‘Quite a lot of things actually.'

‘Watering your plants and forwarding your post?' Rose frowned. ‘Don't you have someone who comes in to do that for you?'

‘Nothing like that. We have all those empty houses in Kensington and no one to live in them and there are all those people with nowhere to go. I'm going to send them to you,' Edward said as if that was a perfectly sensible plan. ‘You'll need to sort out their papers, rustle up some British relatives who'll sponsor them, oversee work on the houses, furnish them. Then you'll have to find jobs for the ones who are able to work, but even the ones who can't, they still get a roof over their heads. They'll all have somewhere to call home.'

‘I can't do that!' There were a hundred, a thousand reasons why she couldn't. Rose started with the most obvious one. ‘I haven't got time. There's my job —'

‘Rose, you're wasted in that café. You should be doing more with your life than mopping floors and peeling carrots.'

‘You can't just magic paint and long-lost relatives out of thin air.' The war hadn't even been over for a day and Rose knew that when she went to the shops in the morning, the shelves wouldn't suddenly be crammed with all the things that had slowly disappeared. ‘I tried to buy a packet of hairpins and the shopkeeper looked at me as if I'd asked to buy the Crown Jewels.'

Edward was unmoved. ‘Money won't be a problem. My lawyer and my man of business will help. You can even put Mickey Flynn on the payroll if you have to.'

‘But, Edward, I can't!' She rose up on her knees so she could look him in the eyes. He looked steadily back at her, and then reached out to smooth back the one errant lock of her hair that would never stay pinned and rolled. ‘No one would take me seriously. I'm just a girl.'

‘You're the only person I trust to do it.' He sighed. ‘Besides, once you've set your heart on something, it's impossible to say no to you.'

‘That's simply not true,' Rose said because all people ever did was say no to her.

‘Let me remind you.' Edward stood up, walked over to his desk by the window and opened one of the drawers. ‘I didn't want to give this to you before… You tried to put a brave face on it but I know you've been sad, so dreadfully sad, and I didn't want to add to your burden.'

He held out a sheet of paper but Rose made no move to take it from him. She didn't think she could bear even an ounce more unhappiness.

‘You asked me to find out what had happened to your… friend?' Edward prompted.