After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  Leo glanced over to where Jane was still perched on the arm of a chair. ‘God, I’d forgotten how well you scrub up,’ he said. She’d had better, more elegant compliments but they’d lacked Leo’s sincerity. When Leo bothered to make the effort, he could be so sweet. Suddenly, Jane wanted to pretend that she was a proper wife and that Leo had meant it when he promised to love, honour and protect her. Tonight, she needed his protection.

  Lydia appeared in the doorway to announce that Rose was waiting for them in the dining room and when Leo got his feet, Jane tucked her arm in his and gave it a little squeeze as they walked through.

  ‘You look really good,’ Jane said slightly incredulously, which made Leo wonder if he’d really looked that bad before. ‘Positively svelte. Just how much hard labour have you been doing, darling?’

  ‘I think it’s because I’ve cut down on the booze,’ Leo told her. ‘If I’m not hammered then I don’t get a craving for a doner kebab with all the trimmings once they’ve called last orders.’

  ‘Yuck.’ Jane grimaced. ‘I fear for your arteries.’

  Rose was seated at the head of the table, George leaning over her to show her something on his phone. Like Jane, she was dressed all in black. It might have been the effect of the candles on the table, the dimmed uplighters on the wall, but Leo was sure there was a yellowing tinge to her face lately that even her red lipstick and the discreet glimmer of diamonds couldn’t mask. Leo noticed that Rose wasn’t getting up to greet Fergus and Charles. That was a first. She’d been fine this morning, but now she must feel… not fine.

  Rose hadn’t lost her autocratic edge, though. She directed them all to their places. Charles on her right, Jane seated next to him. Leo on her left, Fergus alongside him, George at the other end of the table. He didn’t exactly know who Charles was, only that he was some kind of investment whizz and that Rose trusted him with her portfolios, so he had to be good people, because Rose hardly trusted anyone. Then he heard Charles say to Rose, ‘Actually, Jane and I are old friends. Though it’s been a while, hasn’t it?’

  Being an old friend of Jane’s could mean anything: fund manager, distant relative, lover. It was impossible to tell, only that she nodded her head briefly, tersely even, then stared down at her place setting and wouldn’t look at Charles, while he stole tiny, furtive glances at Jane when he thought that nobody would notice in the bustle of shaking out napkins and Frank, drafted in for the evening as butler, bringing in the wine.

  Dinner parties had never been Leo’s speed, but somewhere between the bread and the soup he started to enjoy himself. Fergus was Rose’s heir apparent, charming, amenable but with an iron-coated backbone, much like Rose herself. He also seemed to love the bricks and mortar, the houses, the homes, which made up the core of the business as much as Rose did.

  ‘You were going to tell me about the place on Powis Square,’ Fergus said to Rose after the wine had been poured, and she was suddenly at her sparkling best as she embarked on a long, funny story about renting out a house in Notting Hill in the seventies to a rock star and his wife with a granny annexe for the rock star’s boyfriend and his wife.

  Then George talked about how he’d worked at Seditionaries, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop on the King’s Road, and that early on in their friendship he’d taken Rose to see the Sex Pistols play on a boat.

  ‘Lovely boys,’ Rose deadpanned, as Fergus coughed into his napkin and Leo thought he might actually cry he was laughing so hard. ‘And I only got gobbed on once before the whole affair was shut down by the police. Really, I’ve been to worse parties.’

  Jane and Charles were the only ones who weren’t laughing. She sat silent, teeth worrying at her bottom lip, a deep furrow between her eyebrows. Charles couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Neither could Leo, for that matter.

  ‘So, Leo, what do you do?’ Charles had torn his gaze away from Jane. ‘I know you’ve been overseas for a few years but I was wondering what your plans were now you’re back in London.’

  ‘He’s an artist,’ Jane said quickly, as if she dared anyone to contradict her. ‘Portraits mostly.’

  It wasn’t even the anticipation of Rose’s disapproving sniff that made Leo admit the truth. ‘I’m barely that. I’m between commissions, though to be honest, sometimes there have been whole years between commissions.’ That was the thing with not drinking. It made you confront some hard, ugly truths. ‘These last few weeks I’ve been going out with the property maintenance team. Swapped my pastels for matt white emulsion, you know.’

  Of course his ambitions amounted to doing more with his life than sanding down skirting boards, but then Leo was staring down the wrong side of his thirties and he didn’t exactly know what his ambitions were any more.

  They talked shop for the rest of dinner: Leo, Fergus and Rose, Charles and George chiming in with the odd comment and Leo couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this fired up as he pleaded the case for doing something fancy with the keystone and springers on their latest renovation project in Westbourne Grove.

  He was also saying ‘we’, when he wasn’t part of ‘we’, but a disinterested third party. Except he was interested, especially when Rose talked about her employees’ right-to-buy-scheme.

  ‘When this company started it was solely to house refugees coming from Europe at the end of the war,’ she said, which Leo hadn’t known. ‘Kensington was on the wrong side of the Park, as we used to say. You could buy up huge swaths of bomb-damaged property very cheaply. There were refugees, soldiers suddenly without work, who needed jobs. They got a decent wage and for a heavily reduced rent they lived in the properties they renovated. Back then, we all needed a sense of purpose, the belief that everything we’d fought for hadn’t been in vain.

  ‘I still believe that if people are prepared to work hard, then they should have a decent wage and somewhere they can afford to live,’ Rose stopped and smiled wryly. Maybe she was having a good day after all. ‘Goodness, I think it’s time I climbed down from my soapbox.’

  ‘I like the view from up there,’ Fergus said and Leo couldn’t help but feel a little pang of something. Not jealousy, not entirely, but maybe regret that it was Fergus who shared Rose’s passion, her vision and not Leo, or Alistair, or one of their cousins, so she could keep her legacy in the family. ‘You should be very proud of the right-to-buy scheme. Actually, Leo, if you’re interested, I’ve got a property development company from Denmark coming in who are thinking of setting up a similar scheme. They specialise in carbon-neutral developments. Might be interesting, if you’d like to sit in. I remember we had quite a heated discussion about the challenges of being eco-friendly when renovating listed buildings.’

  ‘Did you?’ Rose sounded quite surprised. Then she stared pointedly at Leo’s elbows, which were resting on the table.

  Leo stopped slouching and sat up straight. ‘Oh, I’m just an unemployed artist doing a bit of decorating on the side. You’d be much better off taking someone who knows what they’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t be so down on yourself.’ Jane had finally roused herself from her funk. ‘If you feel that passionately about the way people live, then get involved. Because it’s important, isn’t it? Everyone should have a home. Somewhere that they feel safe.’

  It was odd to hear Jane speak with such conviction too. Also, she hadn’t called anyone ‘darling’ for at least an hour. Leo wanted to ask Jane where she felt safe, but the conversation had already turned to Charles who was apparently an ethical investment banker, which sounded like an oxymoron to Leo.

  Lydia had excelled herself with pudding – a chocolate fondant liberally laced with brandy – and after dinner, when they were lingering over coffee, Rose smiled at Leo; a smile shot through with warmth, maybe even approval. It had been a long, long time since he’d earned a smile like that from Rose.

  The evening was a success, however you qualified it. Leo no longer felt as if he were being allowed to stay up late with the gr
own-ups as a special treat. He even saw Fergus and Charles out with a firm handshake apiece. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you,’ Charles said and sounded like he meant it

  Leo wondered what Charles’s story was. What he was to Jane. He didn’t seem the type to indiscriminately shower his ethically invested funds on a woman. Maybe he was feeling a tinge of jealousy about that too as he walked back into the dining room for the debrief.

  But George and Jane were crouched down in front of Rose, who was still sitting at the head of the table, her head bowed, hands clawing at nothing and making a horrific, rattling sound as she tried to gasp for air.

  All of a sudden, the evening wasn’t a success at all.

  27

  June–September 1944

  On June seventh they woke up to the news that the Second Front had started. The Allied Forces had landed on the beaches in Normandy.

  Rainbow Corner, not surprisingly, was deserted. The hostesses holed up around the big radiogram in the billiard room, and in between news reports they took it in turns to describe how wonderful their lives would be once the war was over. How they’d never have to eat tripe or bathe in five inches of lukewarm water ever again. It was impossible not to feel optimistic.

  If only they’d known that there were still fresh horrors to come.

  On the Saturday afternoon, a week after D-Day, Rose was walking to the butchers’ for their Sunday meat when she heard a rumble above her, like a motorbike engine about to cut out. She looked up to see a tiny plane, its tail on fire.

  The rumble became a roar became an eerie whistle and then… silence. Rose watched the flaming plane glide gracefully out of sight behind the buildings, then an almighty bang and she dropped to the ground, grazing her knees, as she covered her head with her hands.

  All weekend and for weeks after that, the V1s, the doodlebugs, came.

  If they were at home, they were meant to go to the shelter when they heard the siren, but the two nearest shelters were in Queen Square and at Holborn Tube station and, as Sylvia said, ‘Chances are we’d be dead before we got there. Anyway, if a bomb has your name on it, then it will find you.’ So, they usually stayed in their beds, though Mr Bryce kept threatening to report them to the ARP warden.

  It wasn’t the noise of the V1s that frightened Rose. Though sometimes at night their roar was so close that she swore they scraped their roof as they flew overhead. What terrified her most was the quiet, deathly hush before the rocket dropped, already locked onto its target. It was unbearable – but somehow she had to bear it.

  Even her mother telephoned the café and begged her to come home. ‘You won’t have to join the Land Girls, darling. We just want you to be safe.’

  For the first time since she got to London, part of Rose wanted to go back to Durham, but London was her home now. Her girls were her family, the little ones in the house in Kensington, Paul, Hélène and Thérèse, they all needed her – Edward was relying on her to look after them.

  So she couldn’t go home but she promised her mother that she’d write every day and go straight to a shelter whenever she heard the siren. Yes, even if she was in the middle of the lunchtime rush. Promise.

  June became July and July brought storms and Rainbow Corner was full of new recruits and reservists, callow youths still wet behind the ears who trod on her feet and held her all wrong and still the bombs came night after night. London was bloody and blackened and bowed and Rose wondered if she’d ever grow accustomed to the dread that now lodged like heavy stones in the pit of her stomach. The dread made Rose miss Edward, who’d disappeared somewhere official, because he was always calm and steady even when all around was chaos.

  Despite everything, Rose found herself missing Danny, too, in a strange way. Or rather, she missed the love that she’d used to feel for him; that ravenous love that couldn’t be sated by the little he gave her in return. It had made her feel so alive. But you couldn’t spend your life mourning a love that had been unrequited then so ruthlessly abused. Rose’s bruises had faded away, though not the memory of what Danny had done to her, but still she needed to know that he was alive. She had sent several letters to the address he’d given her, the pub, but no reply ever came from him, so she began to fear the worst. She tried to be hopeful but sometimes hope felt as scarce as oranges.

  She never wanted to see him again, but she didn’t wish him dead or even injured. ‘Or maybe a little bit injured,’ she said to Sylvia, after yet another day without even one line from Danny hastily scribbled on a postcard. ‘I wouldn’t mind if he lost a finger or got wounded by some shrapnel.’

  The end of August, summer diminished, Paris was liberated and how they all cheered when they heard that glorious news. London picked herself up too, dusted off her skirts and was daring to dream again. Rose was even starting to look forward to her birthday because they’d all been saving their sugar rations and Mickey had promised her three eggs – enough for Maggie to make her a splendid birthday cake.

  Then Edward came back.

  There was a note waiting for her on the first Sunday in September when she went over to Kensington. The children solemnly handed her the envelope with as much ceremony as if it had come from Buckingham Palace via a bewigged equerry.

  Dear Rose

  I’d be delighted if you would be my guest for dinner at The Ritz on Friday, September 8 th , 10.30 pm. If you would like, please bring your friend, Phyllis.

  Fondest regards

  Edward

  Rose asked Phyllis to come with her to The Ritz, but Phyllis refused. ‘I’m not promising anything, you understand,’ she said, ‘but that’s the night before your eighteenth birthday and Maggie, Sylvia and I have plans for that evening that don’t involve you.’

  They always arranged birthday surprises for each other. For Sylvia’s, Maggie had wangled her a pass to attend a recording of American Eagle in Britain at the BBC and Sylvia had ended up dancing down a corridor with Fred Astaire himself. They’d managed to get a tiny bottle of Chanel N°5 and seats in a box to see Ivor Novello in The Dancing Years at the Adelphi for Phyllis’s birthday. Maggie’s surprise had been much harder because she gave so little away but Rose had procured two bottles of vodka from a Pole working on the houses in Kensington and Sylvia had come by two yards of black silk so Maggie could make herself a dress. Having dinner with Edward would give the girls ample time to put the finishing touches to Rose’s birthday surprises, which she hoped would include a new frock and lipstick as her Tru-Color red was all but a distant memory.

  The three of them saw her off from outside Rainbow Corner. Phyllis dabbed Rose’s wrists with a few precious drops of Chanel N°5, while Sylvia warned Rose not to drink too much.

  ‘You know what happened last time,’ she said, her blue eyes gleaming. ‘He’ll think you’re a dreadful lush.’

  ‘But have a lovely time, Rosie,’ Phyllis said. ‘And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!’

  Sylvia turned to Phyllis with a look of confusion. ‘But Phyllis, sweetie, you never do anything,’ she drawled and Phyllis squawked in outrage and pretended to throttle Sylvia as Maggie laughed at their antics.

  ‘You’d better go,’ she told Rose, who was laughing too. ‘You’ll be late.’

  Rose was late but Edward was still waiting outside The Ritz for her, as if he’d known she was horribly nervous about having to go inside on her own. He was in his uniform, which always looked so crisp, so beautifully cut that Rose wondered if he’d had his tailors run it up for him, and he tipped his cap in greeting when he saw Rose hurrying towards him. He was taller, less stooped, than she remembered him.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and she’d also forgotten how welcoming his smile was, so all of a sudden she wasn’t nervous about how shiny her black crêpe de Chine had become or that she might make an awful faux pas with the cutlery. ‘You look quite, quite lovely.’

  Rose was sure she didn’t. She’d run out of powder and the hurried walk down Piccadilly must have made her face all red. She waved his co
mpliment away. ‘Have you been back long?’

  ‘A week,’ he said, tucking his cap under his arm and offering Rose his other arm as the doorman ushered them inside. When the door closed behind them, muffling the sounds of the night, it was as if the world outside had ceased to exist.

  They followed a solemn waiter across a vast dining room. It was all Rose could do not to gawp like a halfwit at the garlands of chandeliers that lit the huge room, their glow reflected in the mirrors, the gleam of silver and the sparkle of crystal on the tables they passed. The friezes painted onto the gilt-edged wall panels were like the pictures in art books she used to look at in the school library. Women in pre-war furs and satin and silk shimmered too. It was like suddenly finding herself in a beautiful dream.

  She sat down on the plump red velvet chair that had been pulled out for her. ‘This is exactly how I imagined the court of Louis the Sixteenth before the French Revolution.’