After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  He couldn’t stay in Vegas. Recently cuckolded Norman had all sorts of contacts with thuggish-looking men with Italian names. Couldn’t go back to LA when both his landlord and his dealer had threatened to break his legs. There was also a string of bad debts and angry husbands in New York, but there was always Austin or Portland or Chicago, and America wasn’t the world. Enough time had passed that he could go back to Berlin or Prague and live well for a year, get back into his painting, as long as he stuck to just beer and weed.

  There was nothing for Leo to pack. So he stuffed the bundles into the pocket of his jacket, then tiptoed to the bathroom door to make sure that Jane wouldn’t suddenly burst through it and demand to know where he was going.

  He heard the loo flush, Jane swear, and then it flushed again.

  Leo wondered if she’d been sick. Then he realised that he was about to leave without his phone, which he’d left charging overnight on silent as there was no one he’d wanted to talk to.

  There were three missed calls from Melissa – he hadn’t got round to deleting her number – and one missed call from an international number. An English number. A London number. A number that he hadn’t dialled in over ten years, but he still knew it off by heart and as he picked up his phone, his touch brought it to life again. It vibrated. That number flashed up again and it didn’t even occur to Leo to ignore it.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Leo! I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days . I must have rung at least ten different numbers in five different countries. Spoken to several bitter exes and one man who said he used to be your landlord and then subjected me to a torrent of abuse.’

  Leo sagged with relief because it wasn’t her . He sank down on the bed. ‘Hello, Liddy, my one true love. How the devil are you?’

  ‘Oh, you’re still exactly the same, aren’t you?’ Lydia didn’t sound too happy about that.

  ‘Not really – I’m ten years older, for one thing.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like you’re ten years wiser,’ she said tartly.

  ‘Maybe about two or three years wiser,’ Leo hedged. It was lovely to hear her voice: those hard London vowels that made him think of sitting in the kitchen while she cooked him breakfast and poured him endless mugs of tea. ‘So, what’s up?’

  ‘You need to come home. She’s not well and this has gone on long enough,’ she said simply and not that surprisingly.

  Sometimes he’d wondered… because biologically, at least, she was an old woman but she’d always seemed more fun, more youthful than his parents who were a good twenty-five years younger than her. But then Leo had often thought his parents had come out of the womb worrying about their pension plan and with a preference for neutral colours. Nevertheless, she was old and he knew that she wouldn’t live for ever but…

  ‘What do you mean, she’s not well? How not well is she?’

  ‘It’s come back,’ Lydia said.

  Leo knew what she meant without asking. Because Lydia was practically family and though the family on his mother’s side were riddled with cancer, no one could actually say the word. ‘I didn’t even know she’d had it before.’

  ‘Well, you weren’t here and that time the treatment worked. This time, she’s not having any treatment.’ In his head Leo could see Lydia’s soft, round face creased and anxious. ‘Please come home.’

  ‘Well, maybe I’ll swing by for Christmas,’ Leo said, because when he thought about going home, which he never, ever did, it felt like hard, heavy stones settling in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘Christmas is over two months away. You need to come before that.’ He’d forgotten how dogged Lydia could be.

  ‘I can’t just rock up like nothing’s happened, can I?’ He had a few scars, a couple of tattoos, a suitcase full of stories, but that was all he had to show for the last ten years. She’d be expecting more than that. ‘Did she ask you to call me?’

  He could almost hear Lydia’s lips tightening. ‘She doesn’t know I’m calling.’

  ‘I can’t see the point of coming home. It’s not going to do any good, is it?’

  ‘You can live with yourself knowing you never made amends when you had the chance? You’re happy to carry that burden around for the rest of your life? You really haven’t changed, have you?’ Lydia demanded. She was the only person, the only other person, who could make him feel like some mouth-breathing primordial life form without even raising her voice.

  He hadn’t changed. Hadn’t even tried to. Had decided that he was what he was and that he couldn’t live up to her expectations so there was no point in even trying.

  ‘Leo? Are you coming home or not?’

  He looked up from as the bathroom door opened and Jane stood there swathed in a white fluffy robe and backlit by the lamp she’d left on in the bathroom.

  At this moment he had the clothes he was wearing, thirty thousand dollars courtesy of his one and only lucky streak and a wife who could have been imported from a Hollywood soundstage back in the days when movie stars looked like they’d been beamed down from Heaven. Something had to be going right in his life if he came home with a wife like that on his arm.

  Jane might be a hard sell but she needed his name on the divorce papers, so he had leverage.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘All right. Yeah, I’ll come home.’

  7

  November 1943

  It had taken three weeks of going to the Bouillabaisse every night and being especially friendly to Phyllis and Maggie when she saw them before they stopped treating Rose with such disdain.

  All the smiles and compliments and agreeing with everything they said had got Rose nothing but pained sighs. Every gin and French she’d been bought by her dance partners, she gave to them. Finally, and it couldn’t have come soon enough, Phyllis had cornered her by the cloakroom. ‘If I start being nice to you, do you promise to stop being such a tiresome creep?’

  ‘I’m not being a creep, I’m being friendly!’ Rose protested but after Phyllis had conceded defeat, Maggie unbent a little too. Not much, but Phyllis and Sylvia said that was just Maggie’s way and that she was an émigré from Czechoslovakia and she’d had to leave her family to the tender mercies of the Nazis so one had to make allowances.

  But with the three girls to vouch for her and Phyllis being an Honourable whose father was a viscount or a baronet or some such, getting an interview at Rainbow Corner had been easy.

  ‘Tell them you’re twenty-one,’ Sylvia advised her when they’d met at Lyons beforehand.

  Rose kept her eyes on her cup of tea. ‘You know I’m not twenty-one,’ she’d said carefully.

  ‘Of course I do! We all know you’re not nineteen either,’ Sylvie snorted, even though Rose was wearing her roommate Olive’s heather-blue suit so she didn’t look the least bit schoolgirlish. ‘Just explain that you’ve been bombed out, lay it on thick, and say that your papers are being processed, because they are, aren’t they? Aren’t they?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t had a chance and my landlady has my ration book and…’ It was very difficult to run away and forge a new life for oneself.

  ‘Don’t worry. I know a man who knows a man,’ Sylvie said, then she’d told Rose to scrub off her lipstick and to pinch her cheeks because the American Red Cross preferred their voluntary hostesses to look wholesome rather than glamorous.

  In the end, it wasn’t so bad. Mrs Atkins, the nice middle-aged American woman who interviewed her, was very kind. She nodded and smiled as Rose told her about growing up with four older brothers so she was very easy about being in the company of men, but not that kind of easy. Rose hoped that her brothers would be made to feel welcome by the people whose freedom they were fighting for, as she hoped to make the GIs feel welcome if she became a hostess. She really did need to stop telling so many lies.

  ‘I think you’d probably be happiest dancing, wouldn’t you, dear? If you’re already waitressing during the day.’

  ‘Oh, I would…’

  ‘But yo
u’re not just here to jitterbug; our boys need a sympathetic ear and a friendly smile.’

  ‘I can do that too.’

  ‘Let’s see how you get on after a couple of weeks or so,’ Mrs Atkins said. ‘Do you think you might have your papers in order by then?’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Sylvia promised when Rose came out of her interview with an anxious frown and a Rainbow Corner membership card with TEMPORARY stamped on it in big red letters. ‘Follow me.’

  In the darkest, smokiest nook of Rainbow Corner’s billiard room, Sylvia marched over to a man wearing a pinstripe suit and bright yellow tie and reading the Sporting Life . He looked up with a grin as they approached. He had a receding chin, gums and hairline. ‘Sylvia, love of my life, don’t often see you in my office.’

  ‘Rose, this is Mickey Flynn, don’t believe a word he says,’ Sylvia warned. ‘Mickey, this is Rose. She’s been bombed out and lost all her papers. All of them . Doesn’t even have a birth certificate. Can you imagine such a thing?’

  Mickey, his eyes running over Rose like she was one of the painted girls from the Windmill Theatre across the road, agreed that he couldn’t and said that Rose should go to the authorities to have new papers issued.

  ‘But that takes ages and she’d have to go to so many different offices and departments, unless she knew someone who could do it for her.’

  ‘For a fee?’ Mickey asked and Rose didn’t know how much this fee would be but it was probably best for Sylvia to carry out the negotiations – she was as sharp as a tack and Mickey didn’t seem like a very trustworthy sort of person.

  Between the two of them they agreed that Mickey would supply Rose with a new birth certificate, identity card and ration books for the princely sum of five guineas. It was a princely sum too – just about all that she had.

  ‘That should cover it.’ Mickey gestured at Rose. ‘But now she owes me a favour.’

  ‘Depends what kind of favour it is. You’d better run it past me first.’ Sylvia didn’t sound quite so top drawer any more. She sounded a lot like the shop girls who came into the café and said, ‘ain’t’ instead of ‘isn’t’. ‘Now, where’s your notebook? You need to take down Rose’s particulars.’

  There was a sticky moment when Rose had to look at her temporary Rainbow Corner membership card so she could remember the year of her birth. It also had her new surname written on it. She’d chosen ‘Beaumont’ because Beaumont was the name of the cinema she and Shirley had gone to every afternoon of the two weeks each summer when they were shipped off to their Aunt Patricia in Aberdeen. Aunt Patricia was a staunch believer in little girls being neither seen nor heard so she’d always given them a shilling apiece each morning and told them not to come back until dinner time.

  Rose Beaumont. It was everything a name should be. Sophisticated, elegant, exotic. Someone called Rose Beaumont would have adventures and get invited to dinner by rakish men. Those sorts of things simply didn’t happen to girls called Rosemary Winthrop.

  Rose also acquired a new address a week later when, with the help of Sylvia and Phyllis, she executed a sneaky daylight flit. Phyllis kept Mrs Cannon talking with tales of playing with the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, when she was a girl, as Sylvia and Rose tripped down the stairs with Rose’s suitcase and with Rose owing a week’s rent.

  ‘With what she was charging you and that business with your ration book… well, she’s lucky we don’t report her to the police,’ Sylvia said as they walked the length of Oxford Street to Rose’s new digs: the two-bedroom flat in Holborn on a tiny street near the British Museum that Sylvia shared with Phyllis and Maggie. ‘You’ll have to bunk down with me but as long as you don’t fidget or snore we should be all right,’ Sylvia told her and the rent was only fourteen shillings a week each and there was no landlady living on the premises to take away her ration book and complain about the noise she made going up and down the stairs.

  There’d been another girl, Irene, but she’d completed her nurse training and was working in a hospital in Birmingham. ‘Also she was tiny, barely came up to my shoulder,’ Maggie said later that night as they toasted Rose’s arrival with a Scotch egg cut into quarters and a bottle of peach wine. ‘So we couldn’t wear her clothes.’

  All of Rose’s clothes – and what a pitiful collection they were apart from Shirley’s black crêpe de Chine dress and her mother’s funeral fur – were put in the communal wardrobe, though Sylvia said there was no point in hanging up the pale blue taffeta as none of them would ever want to wear it.

  Sylvia, Maggie and Phyllis were so welcoming that first night but they’d still been appalled when Rose had confessed after too much peach wine that she hadn’t written to her parents since she’d run away. They hadn’t been too shocked about the running away but as Sylvia said, ‘Have a heart, Rosie. They must be imagining all sorts of terrible things – that you’ve been killed by a bomb or kidnapped by white slave traders.’

  The next evening, Phyllis sat Rose down as soon as they’d both come home from work – Rose at the café, Phyllis at the Admiralty offices in Whitehall – and under her gentle but firm auspices, Rose wrote home.

  ‘It’s best to stick to the facts,’ Phyllis said. Then she smiled mischievously. ‘Though the facts are always open to interpretation.’

  First, Rose apologised profusely for the spiteful words in that other letter she’d propped up against the clock on the mantelpiece, then turned to more pressing matters.

  Please don’t worry about me. I have found a job at a small business run by a kindly older couple , she wrote. In the evenings, I volunteer for the Red Cross and I’m sharing a lovely flat near the British Museum with three girls from good families .

  There were also quite a few paragraphs about learning from her mistakes and how doing her bit for the war had made Rose see the errors of her selfish, impetuous ways. Phyllis was very good at helping to write letters. She often set up shop in the Reading Room at Rainbow Corner and helped GIs write to girlfriends and fiancées who had to be let down gently because the man they’d waved off at the docks was now married to a British girl he’d got in the family way.

  Her mother wrote back to tell Rose that as far as everyone was concerned, she was up to her knees in mulch with the Land Girls rather than people knowing that she’d both shamed and disappointed her loving parents in equal measure. After that, it was never mentioned. Rose sent her mother chatty letters about life in London, focusing more on her efforts to find fruit, and her mother wrote back with news from the WRVS committee and the church social committee and the hospital committee and all the many other committees she was involved with as well as admonishments to be careful. The word ‘careful’ was always underlined several times and punctuated with an exclamation mark.

  Those first weeks at Rainbow Corner, Rose was more carefree than careful. The nights all seemed to merge into one delightful whole of dancing with appreciative servicemen who all told her that she was beautiful. Then she’d go down to Dunker’s Den in the basement and let them order her doughnuts, sometimes waffles, occasionally thick American-style pancakes and always Coca-Cola. Each time, Rose pretended that it was her absolute favourite thing in the world. It was a tiny sacrifice that seemed to delight each and every one of her dance partners. She couldn’t help write letters home like Phyllis or listen quietly to their confessions, then offer soft words of comfort like Maggie did and Lord knows, she’d never be able to flirt like Sylvia, but after a few weeks Rose could jive like she’d been born to it and gratefully gulp down a glass of Coca-Cola like it was cold spring water on a parched summer’s day.

  The only dark spot was her lack of official papers. It took Mickey Flynn three long weeks to get them in order. During those three weeks, Rose lived in utter dread of being called into the office and handed over to the police for giving false information on her application form. Or worse – having her name added to the list of girls who were banned from Rainbow Corner!

  Then, one evening, after she�
�d met Sylvia at Piccadilly Circus Tube and they were scurrying past the girls waiting on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue who always called them the most awful names, Sylvia said, ‘I bumped into Mickey Flynn today. You’re to meet him in the billiard room at seven-thirty. Do you have your five guineas? I’d come with you, but I’m stuck behind the information desk this week.’

  Sylvia was already in trouble with the ladies in the office after she’d been seen kissing a sailor on the stairs, though she’d protested: ‘he was kissing me and it seemed unpatriotic to refuse.’

  ‘I have the money,’ Rose assured her as they signed in; she felt that delicious frisson of fear as she handed over her temporary membership card to be scrutinised, but dear old Joyce simply smiled and handed the card back.

  ‘I’ve been told to tell you, once again, no jitterbugging,’ she said sternly to Rose. ‘Any more of those fancy lifts and twirls of yours, Rosie, and you’ll have someone’s eyes out.’