After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  ‘I’m going back to London,’ she said. ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s half past one in the morning.’

  ‘I don’t care! I don’t want to spend even one single second longer in your company.’ Rose wished her words were bullets, but she eyed Danny warily as he rose from the bed.

  ‘Rosie, sweetheart,’ he drawled in that dark voice, which had done for her. ‘Come on. Don’t be like this.’

  Later, she’d be rather proud that she didn’t back away as he came towards her.

  ‘If you come any closer, I swear to God, I’ll scream the place down,’ she warned him in a low voice that stopped Danny in his tracks and he stood there looking hurt and confused as if he were the injured party as Rose stuffed the last of her things in her case.

  She’d be even prouder that when she took off the ring that he’d put on her finger she didn’t throw it at him in a silly, meaningless act of petulance but placed it on the dressing table next to the chipped jug. Then she walked out of the room. Out of his life. Leaving all her childish hopes and dreams behind her.

  20

  Jane and Leo spent Saturday like tourists again. They took a boat from Westminster to Greenwich, then walked along the river until Leo realised that Jane was rigid with cold, too frozen to even shiver. ‘I didn’t really pack for winter in London,’ she said and when Leo took her into a chain store and all but forced her into a sensible, padded coat, he thought that she might cry.

  ‘What fresh hell is this?’ she asked each time she caught sight of her reflection in a shop window and each time, she hit him on the arm when he laughed.

  Leo had thought that pretending to be the people that they’d pretended to be in Vegas wouldn’t work. That it was just trying to plug a gaping hole with wadded-up tissue paper, but both of them were so good at pretending that actually it worked just fine.

  On Sunday, they lunched with Rose and George at Bluebird in Chelsea. Rose and George had been lunching there every other Sunday for years, so Lydia and Frank could have Sunday lunch with their family.

  A steady procession of diners and staff, even an ancient and grizzled kitchen porter, furtively scurried over to pay tribute while George kept the three of them entertained with tales from past Sunday lunches. ‘She was so fabulously drunk, wasn’t she, Rose? After she’d taken off most of her clothes, she then slid off her chair, very gracefully, and fell asleep under the table.’

  Rose was in such an evidently good mood that Leo hoped to take advantage of it. But whenever he put down his cutlery, opened his mouth to start apologising, trying to explain, Jane laid a hand on his leg. Once she even kicked him, as if to say, Not here. Not yet .

  Jane didn’t kick him when Leo offered to get the bill, though Rose raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you sure you can afford it?’

  ‘Bad form, Rose,’ George scolded.

  ‘No such thing as a free lunch,’ she replied, with a smile that was all lipstick and teeth and quintessentially Rose. ‘Right, Leo?’

  ‘Right,’ he agreed. ‘But if there’s anything you need, you only have to say.’

  ‘What else could I possibly need from you?’ Rose asked and Jane gave him an encouraging smile, which was nice of her but not much practical help.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He’d been really good, only had one lager with lunch, but now Leo wished he’d had more. ‘Well, you… the thing is, I’ve been out with the maintenance crew a couple of times last week. Don’t know if Mark mentioned it. He’s down a few men and I thought that I could help out there like I used to if that’s all right with you. I want to be useful while I’m here. Help out with anything you need doing. ‘

  ‘I get the general drift,’ Rose said and her eyebrows shot up again as the bill arrived and Leo peeled some notes off the Vegas rolls that he’d had changed into pounds.

  It took a long time to leave the restaurant. So many people who wanted to waylay Rose. To take her hand, kiss her cheek, to share a story, as if Rose wouldn’t be coming back, though she’d be back in a fortnight. Of course she would, Leo thought, as he watched her walk ahead of him and introduce Jane to the coat check girl. It was ludicrous to think that Rose wouldn’t be here two Sundays from now. That he could go away again, come back a year, two years, even five years later, and Rose wouldn’t be having Sunday lunch with George, every other week, at Bluebird. Even he as willed it, he knew it couldn’t be true and for the first time since he’d got back Leo felt the loss of Rose, even though she wasn’t yet gone.

  ‘Goodness, Leo. I’d forgotten how you sulk when you don’t get your own way,’ Rose said crisply, when he walked through the door that George was holding open for him. ‘Very well. I’m doing my first site visit of a new property tomorrow; you can tag along, if you want.’

  The next morning, Jane waved Leo off to work, then took a taxi across London to Hatton Garden.

  It had been a while but eventually she found the nondescript black door she was looking for and pressed the buzzer. Then she climbed up three flights of stairs to another door and another buzzer, which led to the one-room office of Solly Garfinkel, who paid the best prices in London for the baubles that rich men bought their women.

  ‘Long time, no see,’ he said to Jane by way of a greeting.

  ‘About four years, isn’t it?’ she replied and now that they were done with the formal greetings, Solly leaned back in his big swivel chair.

  ‘What have you got for me, then?’

  One by one, on the piece of black velvet that Solly unrolled onto his messy desk, Jane placed her engagement ring, earrings, wedding tiara, a couple of cocktail rings, a bracelet and a prissy necklace Andrew had bought her strung with sapphire and pink diamond flowers that she’d never liked. Then Solly picked up his loupe and bent his head to scrutinise the stones.

  They settled on three hundred thousand pounds for the lot, most of it for her art deco engagement ring. Usually Jane haggled, Solly expected it, but this time she simply produced the certificates of authentication. Then she turned round while Solly opened the safe underneath the desk and when he told her that she could turn back, there were fifteen stacks of twenty-pound notes on the table.

  It wasn’t much, Jane thought, as she sat in the back of another cab with the money in a carrier bag that Solly had given her. Not for the three years she’d spent with Andrew when she’d turned down the opportunity to spend time with much richer men because she had her eye on long-term profits rather than short-term gains. Yes, there were lots of other gifts Jane could have sold if they weren’t sitting in Andrew’s Bay Area house, if Jackie hadn’t already packaged them up and sent them to charity. But three hundred thousand pounds was not a good deal, especially as these were her prime years. Jane wasn’t going to look much better than this.

  The disquieting thoughts didn’t stop until Jane was standing fifty metres below ground in a vault underneath a private bank in Knightsbridge with her safety deposit box waiting for her on a metal table.

  Before she opened the box with an eight-digit pin code, Jane’s heart always fluttered unpleasantly then started beating faster than it should. But when she opened the box it was just as she’d left it. An envelope containing her old birth certificate that Charles had managed to track down, her change-of-name papers. A couple of uncut diamonds that looked like tiny, dull pebbles. A few pieces of jewellery Solly didn’t want, to which she’d add her tiara, because Solly had said that there wasn’t much demand for tiaras.

  And then there were the bundles of cash and a piece of paper with her running tally on it: six hundred and forty thousand pounds, give or take. Altogether she had just under a million in cash – not that a million went very far these days.

  Charles would despair of her. He’d shake his head and sigh and say that her safety deposit box was no different to an old lady stuffing her life savings under her mattress, but Jane liked her assets where she could access them. Touch them. Know that they were solid and real.

  As real as they’d bee
n that Thursday evening long, long ago when Charles had got home from work and she’d presented him with that grubby wad of money. He didn’t snatch it away for board and lodging, didn’t ask where it had come from, didn’t scream at her for wearing four twenty-pound notes down to almost pulp with her own sweat. He simply sat down and explained what he did for a living.

  Charles was the only ethical investment banker in London. He took his clients’ money and refused to put it to work anywhere that it might fund weaponry, drugs, child labour, sex trafficking; the list of amoral activities was endless, though Charles had laughed wryly and said that having principles narrowed his rate of return considerably.

  He was the only person Jane had ever trusted. She gave him all her money, apart from those few ruined notes, and he doubled it, then doubled it again. She used it to replace the teeth that had been knocked out. To straighten and reshape the nose that had been broken but still looked like her mam’s nose.

  Jane touched her nose now. It didn’t look like her mam’s nose any more. It was her nose. But she didn’t want to think about her mam, or Charles, or any of her ghosts.

  She picked up one of the stacks and, just like that, the noise in her head stopped. This was her ultimate exit strategy. No matter how bad things got or how uncertain the future, if you had cash and lots of it, you’d always be able to escape at a moment’s notice, to take care of yourself. And if she ever needed any more justification of why she did the things she did, it was the four twenty-pound notes in a white envelope. They were worn so thin that the silver security thread was about the only thing holding them together. There were still smears of blood on them.

  The past held you back – you had to let it go, but it did you no good to erase it completely, Jane thought, as she packed everything away in the metal box. She still had what was left of her half of the Vegas money: just over seven thousand pounds, which she stuffed into her handbag for incidentals. Then she closed the lid. It made a satisfying clunk like a full stop. The jewellery was gone, the money banked; there was a neat line through Andrew’s name. No point in regretting what might have been.

  Her last appointment of the day was with her lawyer. Charles had introduced them when Jane had needed new documents and above all else, utter discretion. Mr Whipple operated within the confines of the law, but the confines of the law were full of shadows.

  She was always scared she might bump into Charles, so she never saw Mr Whipple in his wood-panelled offices in Chancery Lane. They met in a hotel lobby, tucked themselves away in a quiet corner. Mr Whipple was tall and thin and grey (‘like a character from a Dickens novel’, Charles had said) and he drank milky tea and made notes in a crabbed hand in a leather-bound notebook.

  Mr Whipple was also very encouraging. She and Leo hadn’t signed a pre-nup and though Nevada was a community property state, that only applied to assets acquired after the marriage. It was doubtful that Leo and whatever shady lawyer he could afford would ever be able to track down Jane’s safety deposit boxes or the deeds to her Primrose Hill garden flat or the New York apartment that she rented out (both of them goodbye gifts she’d negotiated from former lovers who no longer had any use for her), as they were owned by a company whose office was a PO Box in the Cayman Islands. Mr Whipple had been quite adamant about that at the time.

  He also assured Jane that unless Leo was named and specifically excluded from Rose’s will, he had good grounds to make a claim on her estate. Even if he was cast out without a penny, there were always loopholes that Mr Whipple could wriggle through like a circus contortionist.

  ‘But let’s worry about that as and when,’ he said smoothly. ‘In the meantime, one hopes that Miss Beaumont continues to enjoy life for, say, at least another six months, do you think?’

  Jane shrugged. ‘Possibly. I’m not sure.’

  ‘But you’ll need to stay married until after probate has been granted. You can still contest the will up to six months after that, so that’s something to keep in mind.’

  ‘Hopefully it won’t come to that, though,’ Jane said. ‘Having to contest the will. Rose absolutely dotes on Leo.’

  Or she would, by the time Jane was done.

  Yes, all in all, it had been a day profitably spent.

  21

  A week, then two, went by. They were already halfway through a grey, damp November.

  Jane had joined the holistic gym around the corner and in the space of a day had made friends that she had coffee and pedicures and trips to Harvey Nichols with. Leo would never, ever be able to keep her in the style to which she’d long been accustomed but he went to the office every morning with Rose. There he’d meet up with Mark and spend the rest of the day with the maintenance crew.

  The other guys, from the young apprentices to the seasoned pros who had been working for Rose for twenty, even thirty years had treated Leo with some scepticism at first because he was Rose’s own personal black sheep. But it turned out that his plastering skills were still second to none and now that he didn’t have a hangover each morning Leo’s hands hardly shook at all, so they welcomed him into the fold and let him use the drill and the nail gun.

  It was a routine and Leo couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one of them. All of a sudden he had tangible goals: a freshly plastered wall all glossy and salmon-pink smooth. Skirting boards sanded down and waiting for primer. Dimmer switches installed. Sinks unblocked. Bathrooms freshly grouted. All those things done in a day, when there had been weeks, months , that Leo hadn’t been able to produce one decent painting.

  It meant he could come home to Rose and have something to talk about that wasn’t her decay or his failures. Every time he showed her a picture on his phone of an ancient panel of William Morris wallpaper revealed when they dismantled a cupboard, a fully working thirties Bakelite light switch or even the gimp mask that they’d found under one of her tenants’ beds, it was another attempt at finding a way back to each other.

  Maybe Rose was unbending slightly, because on a Saturday morning when even she didn’t go into the office, she asked if he’d mind doing her a favour as they were having breakfast.

  ‘Anything,’ Leo said through a mouthful of porridge.

  ‘I wouldn’t be too eager,’ said Lydia, who might have been unbending slightly too. ‘Rose, weren’t you saying something about needing a kidney?’

  ‘Would that be a problem, Leo?’ Rose was teasing him in a way that she hadn’t done since the awful night he’d come home hammered. Leo was so relieved that he probably would have agreed to give her a kidney, not that his were in any great shape.

  She wasn’t after any of his vital organs, but wanted him to go to Leytonstone where some of her paintings were stored, to do an inventory. ‘Take Jane with you,’ Lydia said. ‘Otherwise she’ll go to another of those yoga classes where they turn the central heating up high.’

  ‘It’s meant to improve blood flow,’ Jane said, because she’d joined them for breakfast that morning too. ‘I have a class at eleven but I suppose I could give it a miss. I’ve never been to Leytonstone, so that might be quite an adventure.’

  ‘Only someone who’d never been to Leytonstone would think that,’ Rose muttered and Leo wished that Rose were with them when they got to High Street Kensington station and Jane confessed that she’d never been on a Tube train before.

  She’d never been to a football match either. Or eaten at McDonald’s (or Burger King for that matter), placed a bet on a horse, been to Scotland or Wales, or even Devon or Cornwall, and a multitude of other things that an ordinary person might have done in the course of their life.

  ‘So, have you ever been to a supermarket?’ They were in Rose’s air-conditioned unit at the warehouse now. It was a fiddly business. Each artwork had to be unpacked, checked off against a master list on the iPad Rose had loaned Leo, then photographed and packed up again.

  ‘Of course I have! I don’t live a completely rarefied existence, darling.’

  ‘Not a fancy organic supermarke
t, but a bog-standard supermarket with a budget range and a frozen food section.’ There were only fifty or so paintings in storage; the rest of them were either in Kensington or on loan to various galleries or museums. They’d be finished in hour, which was just as well as he didn’t think Jane liked Leytonstone very much or Rose’s preference for English pop art.

  ‘Does Waitrose count?’ Jane asked and Leo was about to grudgingly concede that it did when he came across the painting and he felt his forehead grow immediately clammy, his skin prickle and his heart start to race as if he’d just snorted a line of pure, pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. Which was horribly and laughably appropriate given the circumstances in which he’d last seen the picture. God, he’d hoped never to see it again.

  It was still in its simple wooden frame. An oil painting of a jagged cliff edge. Down below was the dark navy sea, the tide pulling away from shore and creating pools of turquoise topped with frilly waves. Painted in 1967 by Dame Laura Knight, who Rose had been introduced to just after the war. It had been one of Rose’s favourite pieces. It had hung in her study in the house in Lullington Bay, then in her cluttered home office in Kensington, but after… well, she obviously couldn’t bear to even look at it either.