After the Last Dance (35 page)

‘You're not intruding. Not at all,' Rose said and she patted the space beside her as if it were a soft, inviting couch and not hard, unyielding pavement. ‘You can pull up a pew, if you want.'

The thought of Edward watching her cry, or howl to be more accurate, made Rose bristle a little, but not that much. He'd already seen the very best and the most dreadful worst of her, but he was still here, sitting down next to her, trying to place his coat over her shoulders.

‘There's no point in both of us being cold,' Rose said, but she let Edward put his arm around her so she could nestle against him. ‘Goodness, you startled me appearing out of the shadows like that but now I think about it, I'm not surprised you're here.'

‘I thought about raising a glass to dear old Rainbow Corner in some dreary German beer hall, but I couldn't bear to miss saying goodbye, so here I am.'

‘But you're going back there again?'

‘Yes.' He sighed. ‘I have to. You see, it's not —'

‘You once said it was impossible to say no to me, so I'm asking you to not go back to Germany. To stay here. With me.' She stared at his rigid profile. A little muscle in his left eyelid pulsed when she clutched hold of his knee. He had ever such bony knees. ‘Please, Edward. Everyone leaves me and they don't come back. I hate it.'

He shook his head. ‘I have to see it through. Don't you understand? I'd rather be anywhere but there.' Rose slipped out from under his arm so she could hold him. She kissed his forehead, his temples, took his face in her frozen hands so she could press her lips to his.

‘Is it awful?' she whispered.

Edward shook his head again as if he had no adequate words. ‘I would say that it's unimaginable, but that would be a lie, because it did happen. That's why it's important to bear witness. To shout from the rooftops until everyone knows.'

Rose began to cry again, though she felt that she had no right to cry when her suffering was unimportant, infinitesimal compared to what others had gone through. ‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘I'm sorry too. Please don't cry any more.' He turned his head so he could kiss her hands. ‘Shall I tell you something that will make you smile?'

She didn't think anything could make her smile but now that Edward was here, being so tender and now so playful, when he hadn't let himself be either of those things before, Rose could only think of how much she'd missed him. ‘You can give it the old college try.'

He gave her a sudden wicked smile. ‘Earlier I popped into my club and a man from the Home Office felt the need to cross the bar expressly to tell me, and this is a direct quote, “that girl of yours is a damn bloody nuisance”.'

Rose gurgled with laughter. ‘It wasn't my Mr Costello, was it?'

‘Probably your Mr Costello's boss.'

‘I hope you told him that the Home Office and the acres of red tape they expect one to wade through are a damn bloody nuisance too!'

‘I did nothing of the sort.' He pulled away from her hands. ‘Rose, it's far, far too cold and we're far too well brought up to sit in the gutter like this.'

Edward stood up and held out his hand. Rose let him pull her to her feet. ‘There were just so many people and when they shut the doors of Rainbow Corner, I felt so sad. Like nothing good was ever going to happen again. I feel wicked for saying this, but I miss the war. In a way, it was glorious, wasn't it? Wasn't it?'

She'd lived with the uncertainty of war for so long and now every day was the same. Life seemed smaller. The good times weren't harder, faster, brighter compared to the bad times, which no longer plumbed the depth of despair and depravity. Without the highs and the lows, Rose felt adrift, as if she were merely treading water, the horizon never getting any nearer or further away. So yes, she rather missed the war.

‘It made heroes of us all, didn't it?' Edward said, as he linked his arm through hers and led her out of the alley. ‘Whether we deserved it or not.'

Edward, in his quiet way, was a hero. He'd saved lives, rescued widows and orphans and even now, when other men were hanging up their uniforms, he was avenging the people whose lives he couldn't save.

‘I'm not much of a heroine,' Rose said. ‘Not when I ran away to London for excitement and glamour and because I didn't want to be a Land Girl and wear corduroy knickerbockers.'

‘You've had heroic moments. We all have,' Edward said emphatically and maybe he was right. Maybe they all were heroes in their own small way.

They'd come out onto Piccadilly now where the crowds were drifting away, rushing to catch last trains and buses back to the suburbs. ‘Can we go somewhere?' she asked, because she didn't want her last memory of Rainbow Corner to be streaked with tears and she didn't want to go back to Edward's flat. Not yet. ‘Somewhere that we can dance.'

‘And drink champagne. The American Bar at The Savoy seems appropriate. Let's find a taxi.'

There were no taxis. ‘Anyone would think there was a war on!' Rose said as they walked along Coventry Street. ‘It will be odd when all the GIs finally go home not to hear an American accent any more. You don't sound remotely American.'

‘I've lived here since I was eight so any accent I did have was thrashed out of me at prep school,' Edward said. They were holding hands now and Rose was wearing his coat because it was easier to wear it than argue over whether she should wear it. ‘I'll have to go back to New York for a while once this business in Germany is over.'

Rose came to a halt in the middle of the street. ‘You said that you'd come back after Germany. To me. You didn't say you were going away again.'

He stared at the hand that she'd been holding as if he couldn't quite understand why she'd let go. ‘You see… well. I thought – that is, I hoped you'd come with me.'

‘But there's too much to do here. There are all these people turning up and none of them are fit for work. They need somewhere to stay and food and warm clothes. How am I meant to go to New York?' she demanded and she didn't know why she was thinking of reasons, excuses, obstacles to stop her, but then someone else had promised her the world and that promise had been as empty as his heart.

Edward stepped back from Rose. ‘It would be easy enough to take on an assistant for you but if you're set on staying here then I won't try to change your mind,' he said stiffly. ‘I was mistaken. Forgive me.'

That was the other thing that Rose missed about the war. How it simplified everything into yes or no, black or white, dance or sit this one out. Everything was so much more complicated now. There were no handy little pamphlets from the government to tell you what you had to do. Rose couldn't tell Edward that she loved him, but she knew that she wanted to be with him for as long as he'd have her.

‘Haven't you realised by now that I often say things that I don't really mean?' she asked him. ‘If you could bear to be around someone like that, then I would still quite like to go to the American Bar with you, and maybe New York,' she persevered and Edward wasn't looking quite so boot-faced as he had done. He even held out his hand for Rose to take. ‘I did hear a rumour that there's no rationing in America. That you can just walk into a store and they allow you to buy whatever you want. I can't even countenance such a thing.'

‘Probably a cruel rumour. I'm sure they have to ration some things, otherwise it would just be bad form.' Edward still sounded a little wooden. ‘Also, when we get back from New York, I'm going to buy another house. Would you like to live by the sea, Rose?'

‘Perhaps,' she said but she wasn't going to allow herself to say any more than that. First he had to go away again and then come back. Then there might be a trip to New York and only then would she think about whether she wanted to live by the sea.

‘I think it would be lovely to have a little cottage somewhere in Sussex or Kent. To be in the country, but also to be near to the sea.' He shot her a sidelong glance. ‘When I'm in my barren hotel room in Nuremberg, reading witness statements, I close my eyes and think of the two of us sitting in an English country garden, with apple trees and rose bushes in every colour you could think of. I can hear birdsong and beneath that, the sound of waves lapping against the shore. There has to be a garden like that somewhere in England, surely?'

Edward smiled at her bashfully as if he hadn't meant to say that much but Rose was pleased that he had. They were walking past Charing Cross station now. Soon they'd reach The Savoy.

‘I missed you,' she said. ‘I'm so glad you came back.'

‘I missed you,' Rose said to Leo the next morning. ‘I'm so glad you came back.'

‘I missed you too, Rose.' He ever so gently lifted the hand that didn't have the cannula carved into it and kissed her wrist right where her pulse must have once beat out a frantic rhythm. It was faint and thready now. She smelt of something slightly over-ripe, like flowers a day away from drooping decay. ‘I wanted us to be friends again.'

She smiled. Awkwardly patted his cheek. ‘I missed you so much. Promise that you won't go away again.'

‘I won't.' Guilt gnawed at him. That was why he was doing penance now at her bedside, had done the entire nightshift, because yesterday he'd been a no-show. Yesterday had been terrible. Probably not as terrible as it had been for Jane, left to sit with Rose for hours and who'd left Rose's bedroom looking as if she'd narrowly avoided a collision with a ten-ton truck, but still pretty bad.

Rose was in the weeds now. Weeks had become days and the days were shrinking down to hours. Hours that he'd wasted going to Leytonstone and back with George on a day when Leyton Orient were playing at home. They'd sat on the Tube and George had suddenly said, ‘We agreed that when she got to the end, she wouldn't see me. Said it would be too cruel for both of us. But the end has come too soon and I haven't had a chance to say goodbye to her.'

Then George had cried again and even though the train was stuffed full of men, testosterone thick around them, Leo had taken George's hand and dared any of them to call him out.

But when they'd got to the art storage facility, the woman on the desk had refused to let Leo in without two forms of ID and signed permission. She didn't care that Leo was on a clock.

He'd shouted at her. He'd sworn at her. Then he'd wept as George gently pushed him to one side and said, ‘My dear boy, stop causing such a commotion. I can sign us both in,' because if Leo had stopped to think about it, then of course George was Rose's designated curator.

The painting was propped up against the bedroom wall but now, no matter that it symbolised the gulf between them closing up, Leo couldn't give it back to Rose. The cliff-edge, the dark sea – it was too prescient. He wanted to cry again.

Maybe it was being off the booze and pills. He wasn't numb any more, but having to feel everything.

There was a gentle tap at the door. Agnieska, about to finish the night shift, and Neta, about to start the day shift, were here to reload the pump, check Rose's blood pressure and temperature, change the bed linen and ‘make Ms Beaumont a little more comfortable'.

It was a hackneyed old cliché but there was a certain truth to ‘live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse', thought Leo as he left the room, though he wasn't sure he qualified. Apart from the living fast. God, he'd done that.

‘Morning, darling.' Jane was slowly negotiating the stairs with a laden tray. ‘I thought you'd be ready for breakfast.'

She reached him and set the tray down on the occasional table that had been placed outside Rose's suite along with two armchairs and they breakfasted together. There was a tense moment when Jane told him off for leaving crumbs in the butter, but he found comfort in the mundane. ‘God, now I feel bad about enjoying a piece of toast and marmalade and a pot of tea that's been left to stew for just long enough.'

Jane paused with her knife in the raspberry jam. ‘I don't know how I feel any more,' she said, holding up a piece of Lydia's sourdough toast as evidence. ‘I'm eating my feelings instead.'

‘Morning.' They both turned to greet Dr Howard, who opened the door to Rose's suite just wide enough that he could slide through, then shut it behind him. As if there were all sorts of arcane rituals going on inside.

‘Was she awake?' Jane's voice dropped to a whisper as if anything louder might penetrate the walls.

‘Not for long, but she said she'd missed me and she was glad I was back.' God, he was on the verge of tears
again
. ‘I can't even tell you what that means.' He let his voice drop even lower. ‘Even if she goes today, I had that moment.'

Jane took his hand, her fingers smeared with jam, and Leo lifted it to his lips, as he'd done with Rose, and kissed Jane's knuckles. Jane's skin was tea-warmed and pulsing with life. ‘She talked a lot yesterday,' she said. ‘About the past, mostly, but she said that when she was ready, she wanted us both there. Said she was so pleased that you'd come home then too.'

Jane was a consummate liar. Leo was sure that you could hook her up to all sorts of devices and she'd never give herself away. But Rose had told him the exact same thing, so they couldn't both be lying. ‘Look, this thing between us, I know it's complicated, but I'm glad you stuck around. Not sure how I'd have coped if you weren't here.'

‘You'd have coped just fine,' Jane said. Now
that
was a lie and they both knew it. ‘Darling, any chance of having my hand back so I can drink my tea
and
eat my toast at the same time?'

‘So you'd rather eat breakfast than hold my hand?' he asked Jane, because that little thrum between them had started to vibrate again. ‘God, you're a heartless wretch.'

She pouted. ‘I'm not, darling. I'm just very hungry.'

He dropped her hand. ‘There. You can have it back, then.'

‘Let me finish my toast and then you can hold it again,' she promised, like she wasn't his wife but a beautiful girl he was flirting with in a bar.

If they stayed married for fifty years, had breakfast together every morning, would he inevitably take Jane for granted or would he always flirt with her like she was a beautiful girl he'd just met in a bar? It was worth thinking about.

‘As long as you wipe the jam and butter off your fingers first,' he told her with a grin. ‘You're kind of sticky.'

‘So I am,' Jane agreed and she sucked the offending fingers into her mouth, smiled round them when he raised his eyebrows and —

‘God! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!'

The frightened, mewling voice was loud enough to breach the walls.

Leo froze in an agony of indecision. Should they go in? Would they see something they shouldn't see? Would it be compromising Rose's dignity? So many reasons to sit there and do nothing…

Then a reedy, high-pitched wail that had both of them bolting into the room where Rose was propped up between Neta and Agnieska, stalled on her journey to the bathroom. Static white hair fell into a face that was distorted in pain, hands clutching at nothing, while even the good Dr Howard looked on helplessly.

 

It took all five of them to get Rose back into bed when every movement, every touch, even the displacement of air against her skin, made her moan.

When Rose had regained some kind of control over her own treacherous body and wasn't making those awful sounds any more, Jane steeled herself to approach the bed and take Rose's hands. ‘Darling, you're all right. Everything's going to be all right.'

‘I'm not,' Rose insisted. ‘Do something. Make it go away. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!'

She had to be ready now. So why was she struggling so hard?

‘Give her something,' Jane barked at the doctor. ‘She shouldn't be in this much pain.'

Leo came in on the chorus. ‘Yeah. Do it.'

Dr Howard nodded. ‘If you're sure?'

He was looking straight at Leo, who held his gaze and nodded back. ‘Absolutely sure.' Then he turned to look at Rose, though her head was lowered and she was chanting, ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!' under her breath, like a mantra.

Jane watched as the doctor directed Neta to inject something straight into the cannula in the back of Rose's hand. It seemed to take a long, long time before Rose quietened, then dozed and Neta could rearrange her pillows and pull the covers up around Rose as she slept.

Jane still had this horrid fear that Rose could feel all the pain and torment but was trapped behind a drug-induced haze and couldn't tell them.

But still they all pretended that Rose was simply sleeping, though Dr Howard said that her kidneys were shutting down now. ‘If there's any change, call me,' he murmured before he left. ‘It could be hours, it could be days.'

He'd been saying that for what felt like weeks. Death didn't keep to a schedule. As soon as he'd padded down the stairs, Leo turned to Jane and she held out her arms so he could fall into them. ‘We will get through this, Leo,' she told him sharply. ‘Because Rose needs us and we don't want to let her down.'

‘Don't go all tough love on me,' he groused, but he kissed her cheek and at least he was still up to making jokes, even if they weren't good jokes.

The vigil continued. Neta was banished to the kitchen but came up every hour, along with Lydia who brought tea and sandwiches, or tea and cake, or simply just tea, to check on Rose.

Rose slept on, mouth open as her body tried to release the toxins that her kidneys couldn't. Her wheezing added to the ambient noise from the bed, the pump and the beeps from the game on Leo's phone, which was annoying, but Jane couldn't summon up the energy to tell him that it was annoying. It was exhausting watching someone die.

Eventually, she went downstairs for dinner, then stood shivering outside the kitchen door as she and Lydia shared a glass of wine and Lydia smoked a cigarette, blowing the smoke out of one side of her mouth like a wisecracking heroine from a black and white movie.

Then Jane rushed back upstairs, terrified that Rose would have gone in her absence. That the gasps would have got fewer and fewer, then simply stopped. No deathbed confessions. No final words. That she would just go.

But she still wasn't ready. Katya had replaced Neta. And Agnieska had replaced Katya. Jane had told Leo to go to bed and catch a few hours' sleep but he was sprawled in the chair next to hers, breathing heavily, and occasionally he'd drop off long enough to snore so loudly that he woke himself up again with a startled cry of, ‘I wasn't asleep.'

Each time it happened, Jane laughed. Leo laughed too when he told her that he didn't want the last thing that Rose ever heard to be Jane crunching her way through a bag of kettle chips.

They took turns to moisten Rose's lips with the foam lollipops dipped in iced water. They'd even played I-Spy at one point but now Agnieska had been in to do her checks and report that Rose's blood pressure was low but her pulse was steady and Leo was asleep. Not even snoring now, but curled up as much as he could in the chair and it was only Jane left.

It was very lonely. Jane wondered why the Germans with their strange portmanteau words didn't have a phrase to describe the bleak mood that settled around you between three and five a.m. when you and the dying were the only ones left awake.

‘Rose?' she whispered, because Rose's eyes were open and fixed on her. ‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm ready. Everyone is waiting for me but I can't go…'

‘Why not?' Jane wondered if this was a strange dream. She ran a series of checks, even pinched herself, but, no, it was just her luck to still be awake. ‘Darling, we've talked about this. You don't need to stay if you're ready, you can go.'

‘I can't.' It was only because the room was so still that Jane could make out the words. ‘I'm stuck.'

‘Can you see a light? Can you move towards it?' For God's sake, what was she talking about? There was no light. No heaven. No hell. Nothing.

‘Help me. I can
not
go on. No. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!'

‘It's all right, darling. I'm here.'

‘You said you'd help me when the times comes. Now.
It's now
.'

Jane hadn't realised that that was what she was agreeing to when she'd promised Rose she'd be there at the end. Or maybe she had, because Jane wasn't agonising over what she should or should not do. She was already glancing around the lamp-lit room to see what she could use to speed Rose on her way. A cushion seemed the best option but what if Rose wasn't truly ready? What if she struggled? Fought it? So it wouldn't be helping. It would be something else, something that Jane wasn't sure that she could do.

But this was what Rose wanted. What she'd planned. ‘The champagne and pills? Do you want that, Rose? Can you swallow?'

‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Oh please. Please. Stop it.'

If Rose was stuck then she wasn't going anywhere and Jane could slip out of the room and creep silently through the house. She smoked one of Lydia's cigarettes as she calmly selected a bottle of champagne from the huge wine fridge, a 2002 Dom Ruinart, not the most expensive, but probably the nicest. Then she went back to Rose's room, to the bathroom where the nurses, even Dr Howard, had got sloppy, and took a packet of pills from the green drug safe, which had been left unlocked.

It was to her credit that she did think about fleeing into the night, thought about it again, then walked back into Rose's room.

‘Where have you been?' Leo asked hoarsely. He wasn't meant to be awake. ‘Champagne? Really?'

‘It's for Rose, isn't it, darling?'

Rose's eyes were open but she was muttering indistinctly and looked frightened. She was determined to make this as hard as possible.

‘It's a nice gesture but if she can't swallow water, then how is she going to sip champagne?'

Jane had been wondering that too. About how she was going to get three or four, even five or six temazepam into Rose without a struggle. It was the struggle that she was most worried about. But now that Leo was awake, that was something else to worry about too.

One thing at a time. She ignored Leo as she circled the bed, then perched on the other side to him and took Rose's hand. ‘Darling, do you still want to go?'

There was nothing but muttering, which made no sense. Jane wondered why it was so hard to die, though she already knew the answer, when Rose said very clearly, ‘I want to go. I can't bear it any more. Help me. Now.'