Edward shot her a startled glance. ‘Just how old are you?’
Oh, damn . ‘I was a very late bloomer,’ she improvised. ‘What little project? Is it to do with the war? Is it top secret?’
‘I won’t bore you with the details now.’ Edward was vague where Danny was evasive. ‘Could I tag along to Bayswater, then show you what I had in mind after that?’
There was no earthly reason why Rose would want to spend the afternoon with Edward. He was old, at least thirty, and she knew nothing about him, other than that he was involved in possibly clandestine things , and though he’d been kind that other night, he was still quite unsettling to be around. ‘Surely you’ve better things to do than come to Bayswater on a fool’s errand for some rumoured bananas?’
‘We’ll never win the war with that kind of attitude,’ Edward said. Rose had forgotten about that serious smile of his. ‘Shall we take the bus? My treat.’
There were no bananas. The greengrocer rumoured to have had a delivery said even if he did have some, they were for his regular customers and Rose needn’t think she could swan in without a by-your-leave to buy bananas and deprive the good people of Bayswater of them.
Then Edward pointed out that it was illegal to refuse to sell Rose fruit, including bananas, because they weren’t rationed, which simply exacerbated matters. The grocer picked up his broom and all but chased them out of the shop.
Rose would never have imagined that she and Edward, grave, serious, earnest Edward, would run down Queensway, hand in hand, winded with laughter.
She was still giggling when they reached Whiteleys. Parts of the store were still scarred by the damage from the Blitz and one would have thought they’d have been grateful for the custom, but the haughty young woman in the haberdashery department refused to even look for any remnants of summer-weight fabric. When she pointedly turned her back on Rose to serve another customer, Edward whispered in her ear, ‘Maybe she’s the greengrocer’s daughter? There’s something of a family resemblance, perhaps? A certain pugnacious set to the chin?’
Rose snorted with laughter but once they were on the 27 bus to Kensington with her afternoon off wasted, she sighed. ‘I’m never going to Bayswater ever again. Not even if they’re giving away silk dresses. Horrid people.’
Edward said that she was possibly being a little unfair but then he asked after Sylvia and it might have been because it was daylight and they were on a bus, and then walking along the streets of Kensington, but it seemed to Rose that Edward wasn’t staring at her at in that discomfiting way of his and it was easy to talk to him without falling over her words.
She found herself telling Edward about the two pork chops and runner beans that Phyllis’s mother had sent and how Maggie had produced one of her magical feasts on the Baby Belling. They’d stopped walking by now. Or Edward had stopped and Rose’s story came to an uncertain halt too. ‘And the flat positively reeked of garlic for days afterwards but it was worth it. Are we near the project you’re working on?’
‘Right outside it, actually,’ Edward said.
Rose didn’t know this part of London – Kensington – at all. The big white houses were different from the red-brick terraces all crammed together in Holborn. But white stucco or red brick; everywhere in London was soot-stained and dust-streaked. Streets were incomplete, buildings ripped in half with their insides on display. House, house, then nothing but debris and dust to mark the place where people had eaten their breakfast and tea, read the papers, had a bath. Their absence made Rose think of teeth snapped out of an old comb.
In the small square where they were standing, there were no gaps, but the buildings were empty and shabby. On the far side of the square, a small patch of grass and rubble separating them, the once tall and elegant houses listed to one side.
Rose wondered what she was doing with a man she barely knew in a semi-derelict, deserted square far from the bustle of more inhabited streets where someone might hear her if she screamed.
‘Outside what?’ she asked, holding her handbag out in front of her.
‘Well, all of it,’ Edward said. He gestured at the building in front of them. Most of its windows were missing and instead of a roof it had a green canvas flapping forlornly in the breeze. ‘I’ve bought it.’
‘This house? I hope it didn’t cost you very much.’ Rose turned away. ‘Goodness, it must be getting late.’
‘I’ve bought the whole square. Well, apart from three houses on the other side that weren’t for sale.’
‘You’ve what?’ She looked again at the broken, haphazard houses lurching crookedly against the deepening sky. ‘Why on earth would you want to buy this ?’
‘I know it’s on the wrong side of the Park, but I had my reasons. Good reasons,’ Edward said and he opened his arms, held out his hands in supplication. ‘However, I now find myself at something of a loss and in desperate need of help.’
‘But I know absolutely nothing about buying houses.’ Despite that, her curiosity was piqued so Rose followed Edward up the crumbling path, black and white tiles once arranged in a pretty geometric pattern now smashed beyond repair.
Inside it was quite a hive of industry. Men were hammering and sawing and sloshing distemper on walls.
There wasn’t any bomb damage, just neglect and the determined attentions of the neighbourhood tomcats, Rose thought as Edward pointed out various features. ‘I thought the stove could go there,’ he said when they reached the last room on the ground floor that backed out onto a wilderness that must have once been a garden. ‘This would do as a bathroom if there was a bedroom on either side, don’t you think?’ he asked after they’d climbed a rickety ladder to get to the first floor because the staircase was rotten.
‘Are you going to live here? It’s awfully big just for one person.’ Now they were on the second floor where Edward was planning more bedrooms and even another bathroom, which seemed excessive.
‘Some people are coming to stay. Hopefully,’ he said and he crossed his fingers and smiled his grave smile. ‘Refugees from Europe.’
‘Refugees?’ Rose frowned. ‘How would they get out of Europe?’
‘It can be done. It’s difficult, dangerous, expensive, but there are ways.’
Rose gingerly walked across the floor – it seemed likely the boards were rotting too – to peer out of the window at the square. ‘But you bought all these houses… it would need a lot of refugees to fill them all.’
She heard him sigh, then his careful tread as he came to stand behind her. Not touching, but close enough that it was almost as if he was touching her. He was taller than Danny but Rose didn’t feel that frantic panic that she had when Danny was close. Of wanting his hands on her, his mouth, but then being terrified when she got her wish. Edward was a solid, steady presence. ‘The war won’t last for ever,’ he said. ‘When it ends, there’ll be more refugees. People coming home. Families reunited. They’ll all need places to live.’
Rose remembered Sylvia telling her that a lot of Edward’s business was conducted off-book. ‘You’re not a profiteer, are you?’
He shrugged. ‘Aren’t we all?’
Rose drew herself up. ‘No! Not all of us.’
‘Are you sure about that? What about all those cigarettes and bars of chocolate bestowed on you each night by grateful servicemen?’ He glanced fleetingly at her legs and suddenly Edward didn’t seem quite so solid and steady and Rose’s heart started that familiar flutter. ‘What about those stockings?’
‘They were a Christmas present from a girlfriend,’ Rose said indignantly, because she had never done anything with any of the men from Rainbow Corner to warrant getting a pair of nylons in return. What she did with Danny, what she still might do, was different because they were in love. ‘Anyway, that’s hardly the same thing.’
Edward held up his hands in protest. He was quite clearly one of those annoying people who never got angry. It was always so much easier to know where one stood if people got angry with you. ‘
I refuse to argue,’ he said mildly. ‘If I hadn’t bought these houses someone else would, and after the war I may make some money from them but presently I want them to be a safe place for people who have lost everything, and for that I need your help.’
Rose was somewhat mollified and let Edward guide her down the ladder. They decamped to the tea pavilion in Kensington Gardens. Edward produced a notebook and pencil and asked Rose what furniture he might need.
‘You can’t get furniture. You can get utility furniture if you’ve been bombed out and have a special form but I’m not sure being a refugee counts.’ Rose shook her head at the sheer enormity of Edward’s undertaking. ‘You can’t even get sheets. One of the girls at Rainbow Corner – even Phyllis said her people are richer than God – paid six guineas for two sheets and the first time she put them on her bed, her foot went clean through one of them.’
Edward wasn’t the least bit bothered. He asked her to write a list. ‘There’ll be children too. What sort of things do they like? Toys and such?’
Rose had seen on a newsreel that London’s firemen were collecting scrap wood to make toys, then distributing them to needy children, but again she wasn’t sure that refugee children would qualify. Still, she wrote down everything she could think of in her still alarmingly schoolgirlish script, then handed it back to Edward, who said it was late now and he’d best put her on a bus to Piccadilly because she’d have to go straight to Rainbow Corner.
It was kind and thoughtful of him and although as they reached the stop she could see the number 9 inching towards them, Rose caught hold of Edward’s sleeve. ‘I’ll nag everyone I know to see if they have any old toys and things they don’t need any more. If it would help.’
She got on the bus full of good intentions to ask everyone she knew to spare something, even if it were just a dishcloth, for the refugees. But like so many of Rose’s good intentions, they were forgotten in the time it took to step onto the dancefloor at Rainbow Corner to foxtrot and jive and duck and dip. Then on to another club, then home to bed for too few hours, before she got up for work at six.
It was the rhythm of her days and nights and what with that and pining for Danny, she quite forgot about the refugees and the promises she’d made.
Besides it was hard to concentrate on anything when there a hum and crackle to the air that made Rose’s skin tingle. Whispers on the dancefloor; talk of the Allies landing in France. Even odds that the war would be over by Christmas.
Rose wasn’t sure on either count. If even she knew that there might be an Allied invasion, it seemed certain that Hitler must too and people had been saying that the war would be over by Christmas every year. But, every year, Christmas came and went and the war still trundled on.
Still, a change was coming, easy to determine simply from the sheer number of men passing through Rainbow Corner. Every night was a sea of eager yet anxious faces and Rose had no time between dances to share anything more meaningful than a name and a quick gulp of something cold.
Every night Phyllis claimed to have some inside information that she shared as they all got ready for bed, whispering fiercely in case Mr Bryce upstairs was a German agent as well as working in the accounts department at St Pancras Town Hall. ‘They’re going to wait for a full moon, bomb Berlin to pieces then parachute in as many men as they’ve got parachutes for,’ was just one of the things she’d heard.
Rose would stuff her fingers in her ears because she didn’t want to think of Danny flying his plane on a bright moonlit night so he could be easily picked up on radar and then… she couldn’t bear to think of what might come after ‘and then’. All she could think about was the Friday night to Sunday night, two whole days they’d spend together. Her and Danny. Rose thought about all the funny things she’d saved up to tell him; she’d put dibs on Maggie’s dark green silk dress and Sylvia had marched her to the chemist in Soho, the one with the words ‘Birth Control Specialists’ in huge letters stuck onto its window.
Rose had darted across the road so she wouldn’t even be seen standing outside the shop. Sylvia had gone in, then come out ten minutes later clutching a brown paper bag, which she’d thrust at Rose.
‘A box of Volpar gels and three French letters, the good ones. I’d no sooner trust a johnny from a Yank than a Yank who said he had a johnny,’ she hissed. When her blood was up, her language became quite ripe. ‘You owe me nine and six.’
‘Nine and six! But I was saving up for a perm!’
‘A perm wouldn’t take on your hair and you’d be forking out more than nine and six if you got saddled with a baby,’ Sylvia said, but she never stayed angry or sulked for long. So three days later when a telegram arrived from Danny asking Rose to meet him at Paddington the following Friday night, Sylvia even agreed to lend Rose her crocodile skin attaché case.
17
Leo slept somewhere else. Jane didn’t know where and she didn’t care. She’d locked the door, tried to wedge a chair under the handle, but he left her alone. Not that Jane slept.
She was too rattled to sleep. The memory of Leo looming at her, invading her space, hot breath on her, then his hands… she shook from thinking about it.
Though once she’d stopped shaking, when she did finally calm down, force her tensed muscles to relax and replay the scene, doubt began to creep in. He hadn’t really loomed but he was just so much taller than her and she’d felt boxed in. Jane hated being boxed in. There’d been nothing more than a light touch on her arm, just his fingers, not even hard enough to grip her, let alone make bruises or angry marks. It was hardly a capital offence.
She’d overreacted, and as soon as she realised that Jane felt… not repentant, but a bit ridiculous. When she’d first met Leo she’d instinctively known that, despite his many other failings, he wasn’t the type to hurt a woman. Now she was seeing things rationally again, she knew that this was still the case.
It was just that she’d been hurt so many times before and the way that he’d cornered her, come at her, had triggered memories of bad times and bad men from Gateshead to Moscow, and that wasn’t Leo’s fault. It was Leo’s fault though that he’d come home wired to his eyeballs and laid her bare as if he’d stripped her as ruthlessly as those other men. He’d seen beneath her carefully constructed shell to what lay beneath…
Now everything was fucked up, which was what happened when you were winging it rather than following a proper plan of action.
For one moment, as she lay there, Jane even considered calling Andrew, but it was only a temporary lapse in judgement and she’d been having far too many of them lately. She’d burned her bridges with Andrew. He’d probably forgive her, but Jackie was never going to welcome her back with open arms. Besides, Andrew was still minus his tech billions.
Jane had sat huddled and brooding on the bed for so long that without her noticing, the darkness had receded. It was morning.
A new day.
Time for yet another new beginning.
Leo spent the night in a cold bedroom on the other side of the house. Normally after he’d come down, the buzz worn off, he could sleep standing up. One time, at a party, he’d even fallen asleep on the draining board with his feet in the sink.
But that night, he didn’t sleep. He lay on the un-made-up bed and stared at the shadows, the beams of light stretching across the ceiling every time a car passed by outside, and he thought of Jane’s face. Her beautiful, unadorned face all twisted up. The way she’d lashed out. The words she’d spat at him.
She’d been angry at the barbed accusations he’d thrown at her, his clumsy attempts to make amends, but mostly she’d been frightened. Now that the drugs were no longer fogging his senses, he knew that. Angry and scared looked similar but they were very different animals. No one had ever been scared of Leo before. He was a lot of things that he didn’t like, but being that guy, the kind of guy who women wouldn’t want to be alone with unless they had a clear path to the door, was something that made him feel sick to his stomach.
Deserved the bloodshot, puffy eyes that wouldn’t open any wider than a slit, jowls thickening his jaw, the sagging belly which spilled over the top of his jeans.
Deserved more of Jane’s wrath, which she’d had hours to bring to the boil so he walked down the corridor and into his bedroom with his shoulders hunched in dread and expectation.
It took a while for his sluggish brain to register that Jane wasn’t there, which Leo was grateful about, though it felt like a temporary stay of execution. Then he realised that all her things had gone. Clothes, shoes, the prodigious number of potions and unguents all packed up in her Louis Vuitton case and spirited away by his days-old wife.
After the Last Dance Page 18