After the Last Dance (6 page)

‘No, of course you haven't,' Phyllis said but her massive bosom heaved. ‘Though if London isn't lively enough for you then it's a pity you weren't here a couple of years back. Then it was
very
lively, let me tell you.'

‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that.'

Maggie picked up her glass, almost took a sip from it, and then put it down on the slick-wet table with some force. ‘Have you any idea of what… everyone I know…
everyone
lost someone during the Blitz.'

‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.' She was sorry from the absolute bottom of her heart, but even so Rose had noticed that Londoners had a tendency to go on and on about the Blitz as if not a single bomb had dropped anywhere else. As if no one else had ever experienced what it was like to suddenly have people
gone,
like Janet and Susan from her class at school and Timothy McFarlane who'd once taken Shirley to the fair and had been killed on his first RAF mission, but it was very hard to explain that to these two imperious girls who thought they had the monopoly on loss just because they lived in London. It was far better to apologise again, make her excuses, then leave. ‘So, I take it you two don't volunteer, then?'

Or she could stay and dig herself in even deeper.

This time the look that Phyllis and Maggie shared was less sceptical, more smug. ‘We do volunteer,' Phyllis said. ‘For the American Red Cross.'

‘But we're entitled to a night off,' Maggie added and though Rose's hair was sodden and heavy, Rose fancied that it was suddenly standing on end.

‘Oh.' She tried to sound matter-of-fact, but that one syllable was so high-pitched, it rivalled any note that the band's saxophonist had played that night. ‘At Rainbow Corner?'

They nodded. Sylvia, who'd caught the last part of the conversation, leaned over Phyllis's shoulder. ‘I sometimes think we should pay them for the privilege of volunteering. It's such fun, everyone is so nice and the perks… I have bars of chocolate and packets of cigarettes coming out of my ears.'

‘Do shut up, Sylv. Loose lips and all that,' Phyllis said, reaching behind to dig Sylvia in the ribs. ‘Not that we accept any of the perks.'

Rose didn't care whether they did or not. ‘You volunteer at Rainbow Corner? That's an actual thing that one could do?'

‘Only if one was over eighteen,' Maggie told her. ‘Anyway, there's a waiting list. It's very long. There's also a list of girls who are never allowed through the door.'

She made it sound as if she was going to personally make sure that Rose's name was added to the blacklist just because she had the audacity not to have been in London for the Blitz. Maggie and Phyllis were utterly objectionable and though Sylvia seemed friendly enough, Rose wasn't sure she could trust someone who was pally with such rude girls.

‘Oh, look! There's Cordelia! I haven't seen her in
ages
!
'
Sylvia was suddenly gone and Rose sat there with Phyllis and Maggie, who ignored her for a good two minutes until Cuthbert thankfully reappeared and asked if he could have the pleasure of the next dance.

It could have been any one of a multitude of different agonies which forced Jane out of sleep.

She was face down, her head wedged at an uncomfortable angle because she was still wearing her tiara, which now felt like an instrument of torture. She still had her clothes on. Her wedding dress… she paused to remember why she was still wearing her wedding dress, and as she recalled all the horrors and indignities of the last twenty-four hours, Jane wished she were still comatose. All of her was sore; from her feet, which ached from too much walking in limo shoes, to her head, which felt like it had pincers crushing her skull, and all points in between. Especially in between.

Fuck me into the mattress.
 

Leo had taken her at her word. Fucked her long enough for Jane to realise that despite all the foreplay, all the build-up, she wasn't going to come. It didn't seem like he was going to come either, not even after she'd faked an orgasm. Two orgasms! Then at last he'd come and Jane had pretended to fall asleep while he crashed around their suite doing God knows what.

He was asleep now. Jane sat up very slowly, very carefully, biting her lip because simply sitting up made her clasp her hands to her head to make it stop pounding.

Leo was sprawled next to her, paunchy and pale in his boxer shorts, mouth hanging open, which would explain why he was making that horrendous noise, like a waterlogged machine gun firing rounds. He hadn't looked like that last night. Or maybe her pique and all that champagne had clouded her judgement.

Jane stood up on wobbly legs, grabbed her phone out of her bag and crept towards the bathroom. She avoided the mirror, sat down on the edge of the tub and stretched out her left hand. The diamonds on her ring glittered, but she no longer took pleasure in them.

When the engagement was as new and shiny as the ring and she'd realised that she'd pulled it off, that her disco days were over, Jane would recite the ring's credentials like poetry. It
was
poetry. Art deco, Asscher-cut 6.10-carat diamond, flanked by two baguette diamonds and fourteen round-cut diamonds with a combined weight of 4.44 carats in a claw setting on a platinum shank. Ker-fucking-ching, darling.

It was her reward for all the time she'd spent searching for that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. All the different men she'd tried on for size. The three years spent reeling Andrew in, very slowly, very subtly, so that he always thought he was the one doing all the reeling.

Three years since those awful two days locked in a Moscow hotel room by a Russian oil trader who'd done terrible… there was never any point in dwelling on the past. She'd known then that the party was over; she needed to settle down by the time she was twenty-seven because twenty-seven was the thin but deadly line that separated a good-time girl from a good time had by all.

Plus, being locked in that hotel room with that psychopath… no, still not going there. Suffice to say, Jane was tired. So very tired of hotel bars in foreign cities, scanning the room for a man who wouldn't flinch when she asked for a glass of Louis Roederer Cristal Rosé 2000 so he had to buy the whole bottle. Holding him off, making him wait for another date, playing it out for as long as she could. Besides, the girls coming up behind her were much, much younger and hungrier and the Eastern European girls had no respect for the way the game should be played.

Jane was done with Russian oligarchs. Done with Eurotrash. Done with the spoilt sons of oil and steel magnates. She needed someone who was up and coming but who hadn't quite up and come and she really needed a change of scene. Then, at a dinner party in Aspen, she'd been seated next to a venture capitalist who specialised in tech start-ups. She'd picked his brains, done some research, drawn up a shortlist and packed her bags for San Francisco.

She'd bumped into Andrew during one of the breakout sessions at a TED talk on artificial intelligence. He'd helped her with some iPad-related problem, blushing all the while and falling over his words. Then they'd just happened to keep bumping into each other all over town. No such thing as coincidence – not when Andrew kept tweeting his schedule.

Andrew was green enough and new enough that though he had millions in seed capital, he didn't have a huge team of people, of hangers-on yet. Just a room full of boys who looked a lot like him working on code and a girlfriend who'd been with him since sophomore year at Harvard who didn't stand a chance. Her most pressing problem had been Jackie, Andrew's WASP mother in Providence, Rhode Island but she'd come round soon enough when Jane had sought her advice on how to cook Andrew's favourite meals, gifted her tea couriered over from Fortnum & Mason and finally won her heart with a very embellished story about sitting next to Pippa Middleton at a polo match. The only other cloud was Andrew's sister, Stephanie, who styled herself as Andrew's business manager, though getting Andrew a business manager who actually knew how to manage a business had always been high on Jane's to-do list.

It sounded so cold, but even the most starry-eyed girl approached matrimony with some degree of calculation. There was so much more to Andrew than being a soft touch. He was kind, handsome in a clean-cut preppy way, would never, ever raise his fists or his voice and he'd created the face and voice recognition software that Google and Apple and NASA and the Chinese were all over, which meant that Andrew was going to be very rich. Obscenely, obsequiously, oligarch-ishly rich. So, even if she and Andrew had been spectacularly ill-suited, Jane could have waited it out for three years.

After three years of marriage, she'd have earned herself a big fat alimony cheque, and being a divorcee had a completely different vibe from being a superannuated party girl.

But yesterday morning it turned out that bloody Stephanie, for all her talk of graduating top of her class at Wharton, had filed incomplete versions of his patent applications. They were missing a vital number of components and ironically number four on the list of tech suitors that Jane had drawn up three years ago was working on something similar and now Google and Apple and the Chinese were going to give
him
billions of dollars instead. In sixty short minutes, Andrew was old news. Just another nearly-made-it. Surplus to requirements.

‘You can still get married,' Jackie had insisted as the entire Hunnicot clan had gathered in the bridal suite of THEHotel At Mandalay Bay. It was meant to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding but bad luck had already arrived, taken a seat and poured itself a large drink.

Andrew had looked like hell. His face was as grey as his silk brocade waistcoat, but at his mother's words he'd turned hopeful eyes to Jane, who'd been sitting on the bed wondering if anyone would notice if she put her head between her legs because she really thought she might pass out. ‘Do you still want to marry me, Janey?'

‘Of course I do,' she'd said because you couldn't kick a man while he was down. Not in front of his nearest and dearest.

Then Andrew had talked about the possibility of a job at Microsoft. Of moving to Seattle and maybe even stock options and Jane had nodded and smiled and squeezed his hand when he came and sat down next to her.

Even once the engagement ring had been bought and paid for, every now and again Jane would get a feeling as if icy fingers were clutching hold of her heart. That she was close, but not close enough and it could still all go wrong. Now the icy fingers were back and not letting go. Also, the one time that she'd been to Seattle, it had rained the entire time.

Finally, she'd persuaded Andrew that everything was going to be fine, just fine, and he'd left to wait for her on the terrace. Jackie and bloody Stephanie and Jane's bridesmaids, though they weren't friends so much as the girlfriends of Andrew's friends, had lingered but Jane had begged them to go too.

‘I just need a minute.' She'd swallowed delicately. ‘To think about my parents. I wish they could have been here today.'

They'd melted away and Jane hadn't wasted any time. She'd quickly packed her case, sneaked down the service stairs and out through the staff entrance, and got in a cab that was dropping someone off. She'd only had twenty dollars on her, enough to tip the girl in the powder room, and it was just enough to take her back to the city and drop her off in the not-so-nice part of town.

Jane wasn't cut out to be anything other than a trophy wife but a six-figure salary from Microsoft and even stock options weren't much of a prize. That wasn't what she'd signed up for, wasn't why she'd agreed so readily, when Andrew had asked her to marry him. Yes, she was avaricious, mercenary and materialistic but that was the shape that life had moulded her into. She couldn't be happy with what Andrew was offering her now and if Jane wasn't happy, then she wouldn't be able to make Andrew happy either.

Best to do them both a favour and get out now. When Andrew discovered that she'd bolted he might hate her for a while, but really she was doing him a kindness.

She didn't feel kind, though. She felt terrible. And with emotion clouding her judgement, Jane had walked into the first bar she found and, forgetting all her rules about settling for nothing less than untold riches, she'd married the first man who'd looked at her.

‘Oh God, you stupid, stupid fool,' she said out loud and she put her hands to her head.

‘Hangover's kicking in, then, is it?'

Leo was standing in the doorway. He'd put his T-shirt and jeans back on, thank God.

‘Something like that,' she said and sat down in front of the vanity unit with her back to him, hoping that he'd get the message.

‘His and her baths, I didn't know they existed.' He stepped into the room so he could collapse into one of two deep, overstuffed red velvet armchairs. ‘I've lived in houses that had less square footage than this bathroom.'

‘Have you, darling?' Jane began to slowly remove hairpin after hairpin, yet there were still more and the tiara was still firmly anchored to her head. ‘That sounds rather grim.'

‘Let me help.' Leo heaved himself up with a grunt. He stood over her, took a moment to assess the complicated arrangement of plaits and hardware then began to methodically work on one piece of hair.

It was quite disconcerting and before the silence got spiky, Jane caught his eye in the mirror. ‘You do realise we can't stay married?'

There was no easy grin this morning, no twinkle in those bleary blue eyes. ‘You sick of me already, then? It hasn't even been twenty-four hours. I think that's a personal best.'

‘You have to understand that last night… well, I was at a very low ebb and you made everything better for a while and I thank you for that, I really do, but I don't need a husband. Well, I do, but…' She trailed off. She didn't need to spell it out and hurt his feelings, not when she wanted another favour from him.

‘Yeah, well, I'd be a lousy husband anyway.' Leo handed her the two falls of hair he'd unpinned. ‘We could get an annulment on the grounds of non-consummation. I won't tell if you won't. How would they ever know otherwise?'

‘It would be rather medieval if they wanted a medical examination.' Jane shuddered and Leo grinned for the first time that morning.

‘So, you are going to get married to him, your Mr Ex? Has he called?'

‘I haven't checked,' Jane said. Those icy fingers had a chokehold on her heart again. She'd turned her phone off before she'd walked out of the bridal suite. But it was past two in the afternoon; Andrew must have called by now. ‘I will. Later.'

‘You're not in any hurry, then?' Leo asked. His face gave nothing away as he began to unwind the last section of hair. ‘Want to savour the last moments of freedom?'

‘We should swap lawyers' details before we say goodbye,' Jane said. There was no freedom to savour until she unravelled the mess she'd made last night in much the same way that Leo had unravelled the coils of hair that had been killing her slowly.

‘I don't have a lawyer,' Leo said and Jane wondered if it might be easier and quicker to find a courthouse and a sympathetic judge who would listen to their sorry tale in his chambers and grant them an annulment there and then. ‘Do you want me to get you out of your dress now?'

Jane narrowed her eyes, which made her head hurt all over again. ‘I thought we'd just agreed that last night was a terrible mistake.'

‘Sweetheart, even if I wanted to, I doubt I could. I feel like I've been put through a mincer. Can't imagine you're feeling much better.'

‘I don't,' Jane admitted. ‘There's not one single bit of me that feels anything less than awful. I knew there was a reason why I'd never been drunk before.'

‘It won't last. You'll feel better by lunchtime…'

‘It's past lunchtime!'

Leo shrugged. ‘The best cure is to just get drunk again. Shall I see if there's any more champagne in the minibar?'

Jane considered it for one moment. She'd never got drunk before because she was afraid she might be genetically programmed to not be able to stop drinking once she really started. But the thought of pouring more alcohol down her sandpaper throat made her clutch the side of the dressing table and her stomach clenched violently. ‘God, no! I don't even want to think about it.'

‘You don't mind if I do, though?' Leo didn't even sound a little bit ashamed that he'd only just woken up and he already needed a drink.

‘Don't let me stop you, just as long as I don't have to watch.'

‘You're sounding very judgemental. Like a proper wife.' He'd been so much more amenable last night. ‘So, did you want help unhooking your dress?'

‘Please.' She straightened up again, presented him with her back and all those tiny, silk-covered buttons. Jane kept her elbows clamped to her side as Leo slowly unbuttoned her, swearing under his breath when the task proved too onerous for his fumbling fingers and fogged brain.