After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  ‘Darling! I said, does Waitrose count?’

  ‘What?’ Leo forced himself to turn round, to stop looking at the painting. Jane was standing behind him, holding the iPad. ‘Right. We should stop mucking about and get on with this.’

  She nodded, but seemed quite peeved that he didn’t want to play any more.

  Her peevishness gave way to anxious sidelong glances when they were back on the Tube. ‘Darling, are you all right?’ she asked, after every stop, because she was so used to him playing to the crowd that his silence had to be unnerving.

  But there was nothing to say. Not just to Jane, but to Rose either. Leo understood that now he’d seen the painting again. Sometimes at night, over the years, he’d dreamed about that painting. Often he would be painting over it, destroying it, with thick strokes of dripping black paint, while Rose begged him to stop.

  But his nightmares couldn’t begin to live up to the bitter reality of oil on canvas.

  When they got back to the house, Leo’s mind was set. It was best for everyone, Rose mostly, if he just wasn’t here.

  ‘Darling? Are you sure you’re all right? What do you want to do for lunch?’ Leo was already halfway up the stairs. He paused to look down at Jane. Her beautiful face tilted towards him, like a flower seeking the sun. That suddenly didn’t make sense either.

  ‘What are you even doing here, Jane?’ Leo asked her wearily and she looked affronted all over again, started to say something, but Leo turned away, took the stairs two at a time, so her words were lost.

  All Leo needed to do was pick up the Vegas money and his passport but instead he sat in his dressing room on the sagging Chesterfield he’d liberated from the house in Lullington Bay when Rose decided that it had long ago passed antique and was now simply ancient. He’d snagged the whisky decanter from the first-floor drawing room on his way up but hadn’t actually started drinking yet as he could only handle so much self-loathing in one twenty-four-hour period.

  He stood up. There was an antechamber off his dressing room – too small to be a room, too large to be a cupboard. Stored in there were his paintings. Leo didn’t like to call them his art, because that made him sound like a wanker.

  He flipped through the A2 mounted boards like he was flicking through a set of cards. Then he sat down in the middle of a circle he’d made of all the pictures that had never set the world alight. The only way to do that was to douse them with lighter fuel and strike a match. Make a bonfire and warm his hands on his broken dreams and failed ambition. That was what he’d do.

  ‘Darling, please, won’t you tell me what’s wrong?’ Jane was standing in the doorway. It felt as if their entire relationship had been spent with one or other of them loitering in a doorway, not willing to take those few steps that would bring the two of them closer. Then Jane took those few steps so she could sit down on the floor next to him and pick up the decanter.

  ‘I haven’t drunk any, if you’ve come to check up on me,’ Leo told her. ‘Not yet anyway.’

  Jane put the decanter down, then leaned forward to peer at one of his sketches; a charcoal study of an old man in a betting shop. ‘So, what is all this anyway?’

  ‘My juvenilia,’ Leo said. Jane looked at his work, her eyes narrowed and assessing, like she was in a jewellery shop with a man who’d just asked her if there was anything that she particularly fancied.

  Leo had liked to think that his niche was nineties popular culture rendered in gritty black and white. Take That, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Leonardo DiCaprio rendered in muddy watercolours to give them some gravitas. He’d assembled enough for an exhibition that he was going to call Born in the Nineties , but the dealers would barely look at them. That was when he could get through the door to see a dealer and only then because of Rose.

  His technique was flawless. Everyone had said so. And even now, when he got a rare commission to draw someone’s wife, usually with a freshly fucked glow, his technique was still flawless and OK, he wasn’t going to faithfully record the fine spider-webbing of lines at the corners of their eyes or the faintest suggestion of sagging under their chins.

  ‘So, what do you think, then? Does my art have any depth?’ Leo tried to sound flippant.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid it doesn’t,’ Jane said, as if she knew that, for once, she had to stick to the truth. ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s very amusing but it doesn’t have any soul. But you already knew that, didn’t you?’

  Leo wanted to make a crack about her knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing but that would have been as clichéd as his shitty pictures. Jane’s kindness was as illusory as his talent. It was just a façade when really she held herself as aloof and inviolate as a dictator. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said dully.

  ‘Probably I wouldn’t,’ she agreed. ‘But I know that we were joking about, having fun, and then you took one look at that painting, the one with the sea and the cliffs, and you shut down.’ She took hold of his hand and entwined her cold fingers through his. ‘Will you tell me about that painting? Why it upset you so much? You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but problem shared and all that, darling. Please…’

  And Leo wasn’t going to, but something about the way Jane held his hand and murmured wordlessly and encouragingly had him drawing a picture of himself at eighteen years old. He’d come to London, bag stuffed full of pencils and paints, head full of dreams and schemes, and he’d sit in Rose’s home office when he wasn’t at college and stare at the Laura Knight painting. In much the same way that he’d stared at it when he was a little boy and it hung in the house in Lullington Bay.

  There was something about the picture; so different from the seascapes he’d painted on the beach during those long summers. The hard rock, the forbidding sea; he thought about what it would feel like to stand on the cliff-top and look down. It had called to him – a couple of times, he’d even sketched it – but the kind of art that brought glory and gallery shows wasn’t pictures of the sea.

  It was 1999. Everyone on his degree course at Central St Martin’s was experimenting with video and performance and light installations. Drawing what you saw in front of you wasn’t going to cut it.

  The only thing that Leo was good at, as good as all his friends were with their transparent sculptures and interactive videos, was getting wasted. Art was about the whole lifestyle. You couldn’t walk the streets of Soho without falling over a Young British Artist and if you hadn’t got drunk with Damien Hirst, puked up outside the White Cube, done a couple of lines with a Turner Prize nominee, then you didn’t get to call yourself an artist.

  After his final degree show, when everyone else on his course had signed up with agents and had scholarships and prizes flung at them, they’d all suddenly found their work ethic. Leo had just found the bottom of another bottle.

  ‘Take a year out,’ Rose had said. ‘Don’t think about painting. Come back to it fresh.’

  He could have travelled. Done Ibiza. Gone to Goa. He’d stayed in London because that was where his friends were and if he still went drinking and clubbing and partying with them every night then he was still an artist.

  Rose had threatened to cut him off a few times. ‘Nobody likes a drunk, Leo,’ she’d say to him when he’d stumble in saucer-eyed, after days of going MIA. ‘They’re too boring for words.’ For all her worldliness, she hadn’t imagined that he was getting his kicks with pills and powders. He had friends who would work through the night, chopping out a line each time they started to flag, but he wasn’t working, just dancing, fucking and jabbering to anyone who’d listen about how he was going to be someone.

  Every now and again he’d get the fear. Like the morning he’d woken up with chest pains and a heart galloping so fast that he’d sat in A&E for hours, until his heart had slowed to a brisk canter and he’d slunk away. Or when one of his friends was found dead in a Camberwell squat with the usual detritus around him: syringe, rubber hose, twists of paper like confetti.

  It had s
cared him straight for a while. ‘I just need to do something real,’ he’d said to Rose. ‘Stop messing around and start growing up.’

  That was when Leo had begun to go out with the property maintenance crew. Painted and plastered, learned basic electrical and plumbing skills, even designed, recast and replaced a ceiling rose. He felt a certain sense of satisfaction at the end of each day but he still carried on drinking. Some mornings he was too hungover to go to work; the mornings became days, became weeks and he fell back into his old habits, his old crowd.

  But Rose never gave up on him until Leo began to resent her too because she was the one who’d filled his head with nonsense. Made him hunger for a world away from Durham, away from the safe little life that his parents had wanted for him. She was so convinced of Leo’s talent that Leo had also believed he was destined to be a great artist. When you’d spent most of your life expecting greatness, it was impossible to settle when greatness never came.

  ‘Talent takes time,’ Rose had said, when he tried to explain the thoughts that were crowding his head. ‘A concert pianist doesn’t simply sit down at a piano and begin to play. It takes practice and perseverance, day after day, for years. You have to be prepared to put the work in. Are you prepared, Leo?’

  When he said he was because it was so hard to tell Rose she was wrong, she’d pulled yet more strings and got him a place on the MA programme at the Slade. As a gesture of faith, she’d given him the Laura Knight painting.

  ‘This picture was given to me by someone I loved very much,’ she’d said, her voice trembling slightly as if she still loved that person though he’d been dead for years now. ‘But I know what it means to you and I want you to have it.’

  Leo had been sucked in all over again. Touched by the faith that Rose still had in him. But he’d only lasted three months on the MA programme. Three months of being surrounded by people who were better and brighter than him and he could square it away by saying that he’d done it because he was angry with Rose for pushing him too hard all the bloody time, but maybe the simple truth was that he’d done it to get back at her. He’d sold the painting because he’d known there’d be no coming back from such a callous disregard for Rose’s feelings, for the lover who was no longer at her side, and with what was left after he’d paid back his dealer, he’d got lost, got really, really lost.

  A week later he’d woken up in hospital, his mother sitting in a chair looking as if she’d taken root. ‘Leo,’ she’d said mournfully. ‘How could you? You nearly died . And you sold the painting. Rose is furious.’

  He’d gone back to Kensington, before he was shipped off to rehab. Linda had stayed downstairs, more scared of Rose than he was. As Leo packed up his stuff, Rose had appeared in his bedroom doorway, as cold and as remote as the painting he’d betrayed her with.

  ‘I can forgive you your laziness,’ she’d said, as he’d zipped up his bag. ‘Laugh some things off as youthful folly because we’ve all done awful, arrogant things when we were young, but to throw away everything I’ve given you…’

  ‘You got the painting back, didn’t you? Mum said that one of your art dealers —’

  ‘I’m not talking about the painting,’ Rose had snapped. ‘Yes, well done, Leo, that hurt me more than you could possibly imagine, but I can’t forgive you for squandering your talent. Turning your back on it, on all the opportunities you’ve had. I’m tired of waiting for you to grow up. Gosh, when I was your age, younger than you even, I seized every chance I had!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. There was a war on,’ he’d said in a bored voice. Rose had hardly ever talked about the war (though teenage Rose running away to London in her mother’s fur coat was the stuff of family legend) but in that moment, with his head and bones aching, when even the effort of picking up his bag almost knocked him off his feet, he realised that he and Rose had never talked much about Rose. She’d never talked about the man who’d given her the painting, for example.

  All of Rose’s obsessive focus had been on him. She’d bolstered him up on her own dreams, not his, so it was no wonder he’d come crashing to the ground.

  It was all Rose’s fault.

  ‘Yes, Leo, there was a war on,’ she’d said coldly. ‘It made us grow up fast. Taught us what was important, what was precious; something you’ve yet to learn. If you carry on as you are, then I doubt you ever will.’

  ‘That’s my decision,’ he’d said sullenly, too much of a coward to lay the blame at her feet. ‘It’s up to me how I live my life, not you.’

  ‘Just get out, Leo.’ Rose had never shouted at him. She didn’t need to. Her quiet voice, all emotion ruthlessly reined in, was as violent as a scream. ‘Get out and don’t bother coming back until you’ve made something of yourself and you have the guts to look me in the eye.’

  She’d turned away then, as if watching him walk out of her life wasn’t worth another second of her time. But he’d stood at the doorway, watched her walk down the corridor, stiff-backed, head held high, and the only thing that had felt real was how much he hated her.

  Now, everything had turned full circle. He was back in Rose’s house. Still hadn’t grown up. Still hadn’t made anything of himself, but one thing had changed. He didn’t hate Rose any more – he never had. It had just been easier to hate Rose than himself.

  ‘I care about Rose,’ he told Jane, who for some reason was on her knees in front of him, her hands still in his. ‘I wouldn’t have come back if I didn’t care. It’s just – now I’m here… well, I can’t make things right, because I can’t be who she wants me to be. She’ll never forgive me for that.’ Leo cringed again. ‘She’ll never forgive me for selling the painting either.’

  ‘I think Rose just wants you to be happy. That’s all anyone wants for someone they love and she does love you.’ Jane squeezed his hands even as Leo tried to pull free of her grip.

  ‘If you’re playing me… if this is still a game, some kind of con…’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said and he realised that in all the time that he’d been talking, long enough that his voice was now hoarse, Jane hadn’t taken her eyes off him. She’d listened to him in a way that made Leo think that normally she only pretended to listen to him. ‘You and me, we’re not important right now. This is about you and Rose. You have to find a way back to her.’

  ‘I know.’ Leo leaned forward so that his forehead rested against Jane’s and he was a little bit sweaty but she didn’t even pull back. ‘Don’t think there’s a map for that though, is there?’

  ‘You must be honest with her.’ Leo didn’t altogether trust Jane and her pretty speeches, but he trusted the advice she was giving him now. ‘Go back to Leytonstone and get the painting.’

  ‘I can’t even look at it,’ Leo admitted. ‘I’ve done so many things I’m ashamed of but that’s the worst. That’s my most shameful secret. I can’t believe I even told you…’

  ‘Darling, believe me, as secrets go that’s not such a terrible one. There are people merrily getting on with their lives who have much, much worse secrets,’ Jane said. She leaned in and brushed the hair away from Leo’s face. ‘Listen to me: just because you’ve done a bad thing doesn’t make you a bad person.’

  ‘Maybe I do bad things because I’m a bad person…’

  Jane shook her head resolutely as if she was unequivocally right and Leo was in a world of wrong. ‘In the short time I’ve known you, you’ve only done bad things when you’re on drugs.’ She looked up to the heavens. ‘How can I put this politely? Drugs turn you into a raging arsehole, darling. It’s so simple. Just stop doing drugs and give Rose the painting.’

  ‘I can’t give back what’s already hers,’ Leo pointed out doggedly.

  ‘It’s a symbol, darling.’ Jane rocked back on her heels and took her hands off him. ‘What am I going to do with you?’

  22

  April 1944

  When Rose finally arrived at Montague Terrace after cadging a lift back to London on a coal train, she was relieved to find
that only Maggie was home. Phyllis would gush over her and Rose couldn’t stand to be gushed over right now and Sylvia would probably try to make light of it, say something scornful about Yanks and how they were only after one thing, but Maggie simply took in Rose’s dishevelled appearance, the tear tracks and soot on her face, and said, ‘You look like you need a drink.’

  Rose would have given anything for a cup of tea but Maggie poured her out a tot of vodka. ‘Don’t sip it. One long swallow,’ she ordered and Rose obeyed, then coughed and spluttered and her eyes smarted all over again but at last she felt as if she was back in her own body.

  ‘I don’t believe he cared for me at all,’ she told Maggie. ‘If he had, he wouldn’t have…’ She couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t put into words what Danny had done to her, but Maggie seemed to understand because she perched on the arm of the chair where Rose was sitting, glancing down at the bracelet of bruises that adorned each of Rose’s wrists.