But he couldn’t. No one could. The pain was hers and hers alone.
28
When Rose was able to breathe again, when her lips were no longer blue, she’d forbidden Leo from calling her doctor and refused to even countenance sending for an ambulance.
She had, eventually after much persuasion, permitted Leo to carry her upstairs. Jane and Lydia followed at a respectable distance to allow her some semblance of dignity and so they could pretend not to hear Rose make an awful gasp every time Leo had to shift her in his arms.
After Rose was settled, they’d sent Lydia to bed and Jane had stayed. They’d barely spoken. Jane’s face was white, her carefully applied make-up suddenly garish. In the end, Leo had sent her to bed too. She’d obeyed without even a token protest and Leo had spent the rest of the night sitting with Rose, who slept in painful fits and starts.
Leo supposed that he must have dozed off in the armchair because the arrival of Lydia with a breakfast tray closely followed by a man who he assumed was Rose’s doctor made his eyes snap open. He stretched out his legs, felt his right calf begin to cramp up.
‘Really, what a fuss about nothing,’ said a crisp voice from the bed. Rose was sitting up. She looked better than she had last night but as there’d been five long minutes when Leo thought that Rose might suffocate from lack of oxygen, better was a relative concept.
I should never have come back , Leo thought as he staggered to the kitchen. He didn’t have the bottle or the balls to handle this situation, which was only going to get worse.
Then again, maybe he should never have left in the first place.
Jane was in the kitchen, between him and the coffee pot. She was wearing jeans and an old black jumper that she must have found in his chest of drawers. Her hair was tangled, her face still sleep-creased.
‘You must be desperate for some coffee, darling,’ she said. ‘Black, right?’
‘As black as it will go.’ He hauled himself up on one of the wooden stools and leaned his elbows on the breakfast bar as she poured coffee into two mugs. Jane handed one to him, kept one for herself and took a sip. He waited for her to say something, but she was silent. As if she was the one waiting for him.
‘We’ve all been kidding ourselves, Rose included, that this was under control,’ Leo finally admitted. He looked up at the halogen spotlights set into the kitchen ceiling as if he’d find salvation in their soft glow. ‘That she could carry on the way she was for months and months.’
‘Last night might have been just a one-off.’ Jane frowned. ‘Though I’ve noticed that she hasn’t had much of an appetite lately.’
‘This isn’t a game any more, Jane. You know that, don’t you?’ Leo asked baldly, because ever since last night he’d had this sick feeling of dread like the end of the world was well and truly nigh. Whatever Jane was up to, he didn’t want to play. ‘You can’t be here, in Rose’s home, if you’re only…’
‘What? Only what?’ She was no longer pale but red-faced and surely even Jane couldn’t flush on demand. ‘I said that I’d help you, darling, and that still stands.’
‘Why? I’ve told you already that there isn’t going to be some big payday.’
Even though her face seemed to be regaining its ability to show emotion, it was still hard to get a read on what Jane was thinking, especially when she turned away to gaze out of the window. ‘Whatever else we may or may not be to each other, I thought we were friends, and as a friend I want to be here for you.’
Jane seemed different this morning. Her head was bowed, the graceful line of her shoulders slumped, her posture forlorn. Leo stood up and walked over to her. He thought about smoothing down a stray lock of her hair but didn’t. ‘So that Charles – is he gay, then?’ It wasn’t what he was going to say. Not the right time or place, but there it was. He’d said it.
Jane’s shoulders twitched. ‘Oh… Charles… he’s not anything, I don’t think. Not gay, not straight, he’s just not interested.’ She turned round and Leo hadn’t realised how close he’d got. One step closer and they’d be nose to nose but before he could move back because he didn’t want Jane to think he was crowding her, she put a hand on his arm, her fingers cool on his tired skin. ‘Look, I’m not everything that you think I am. And I’m not always on the make. I’d like to stay, but only if you want me to.’
And when she put it like that, Leo didn’t have to think twice about it. ‘I do.’
She smiled faintly. ‘But I don’t want to get stuck playing bad cop any more.’
‘You won’t,’ Leo said firmly. It was all getting painfully serious again. There’d be time enough for that later. He dreaded the thought of later , so he banished it with a sly smile. ‘Though I can’t promise not to use you as a human shield to deflect the blast from one of Rose’s glares.’
‘That I’ll allow,’ Jane decided then she stepped past him to pull herself up on a stool.
They hadn’t even finished their coffee when Lydia rang down on the house phone and asked them to come up to Rose’s suite.
Rose was ensconced on the sofa in her sitting room, as if she were just resting between social engagements. ‘I thought it best if you had an update while Dr Howard was here. I do so hate having to repeat myself.’
Dr Howard was incongruously perched on a footstool, but he stood up so he could shake hands. He was barely taller than Jane and as sleek and dark and dapper as an otter.
‘So important to have family around at times like this,’ he murmured. Leo wondered if he ever had occasion to raise his voice. ‘Ms Beaumont has agreed to have a nurse administer an injection three times a day for more effective pain relief, though we did talk about a cannula…’
‘No, Gerard, you talked about a cannula,’ Rose reminded him. From the repressed, rigid look on Lydia’s face, Rose had been reminding Dr Howard of quite a few things this morning. ‘And I told you in no uncertain times that it would only get in my way.’
The doctor sank back down onto the footstool. He didn’t look quite so calm and capable as he had when Leo had met him earlier. Rose had obviously been testing his bedside manner to breaking point. ‘Now, Ms Beaumont, we’ve talked about this. This is the time to start thinking about what all our options are. Whether we can make some modifications here to make you more comfortable or —’
‘Don’t use the royal we with me, young man,’ Rose said grandly and Leo knew that they had to allow her this: to put up a good fight, shake a fist at death and all that. He’d start panicking when she stopped fighting. ‘I admit that maybe I’ve been overdoing things a little, but I’ll take the weekend to regroup. I’ll be fine by Monday and tomorrow we’ll go down to Lullington Bay. I’ll be sitting in the car, that’s not going to be tiring.’ Rose sighed. ‘Such a shame that the roses won’t be out. You promise that we’ll go tomorrow, Leo, no excuses?’
He promised, hand on his heart, then they left Rose to get some rest. Leo and Jane saw Dr Howard out. He held a hand apiece for an uncomfortably long count and made a murmured speech about how strong Rose was and that her generation was full of Blitz spirit and that they didn’t make them like that any more.
‘It’s always darkest before the dawn,’ he concluded, just before Leo shut the front door behind him.
‘Do you think he’s practised that in front of a mirror?’ Leo asked Jane. ‘Worked really hard to get the sincerity just right?’
‘I think he probably used an acting coach,’ Jane said with a sniff and even though they might only be pretending to be a united front, it was still much better than having to do this on his own.
After lunch, Lydia asked Jane to take a cup of tea up to Rose. The older woman hadn’t left her rooms all morning and when Jane went in she found her sitting in a chair by the picture window in her bedroom that led out onto a pretty wrought iron balcony.
‘I can’t stand being cooped up all day. I want to go outside,’ Rose said, her eyes still fixed on the bleak winter landscape outside.
‘You do? Are you f
eeling better, then?’
‘I’m not suggesting dinner and a show.’ This was why Jane was never particularly keen on being left alone with Rose. Rose was so sharp, so bright, and Jane had always been a creature of shadows. ‘I simply want to go and sit in the square.’
‘But, darling, it’s freezing and —’
‘I wasn’t asking your permission but my silly old legs won’t do what I want today so I need your help.’ Rose threw her hands up in frustration. ‘Don’t ever get old. There’s not much to recommend it.’
‘Of course I’ll help. You should be able to go out if you want to,’ Jane said, because she remembered what it was like not to be able to do what you wanted to do, when you wanted to do it. Even now, there were times when her freedom still felt like a novelty. Like some delicate bauble that could get smashed underfoot if she didn’t look after it carefully.
So, if Rose wanted to go and sit in the square even though the cold would penetrate bones that Dr Howard had implied this morning were starting to get eaten away by the cancer, then Jane wasn’t going to refuse her request.
‘I’ll get Leo,’ she said.
Leo carried Rose down the stairs again, even though she said she could walk. Frank brought the car round as near to the back door as he could, then drove the few yards around the corner to the locked gate that led into the tiny square. Then, leaning heavily on Jane, Rose made her way to a wooden bench tucked into a tiny arbour created by the trees, which, over the years, had curved around the seat.
Rose was wearing a ragged fur coat they’d unearthed in the attics a week or so ago. ‘My mother’s funeral fur,’ she’d said. Lydia had insisted on gloves and a scarf, Leo was despatched back to the car to fetch the travel rug, then Rose asked him to go to her office and fetch some files.
‘I had planned to pop in this morning, there were a few things I wanted to look at over the weekend,’ she said to Jane, as if she needed to suddenly justify her actions. ‘But I’m definitely going to the office on Monday morning. There’s no question about it.’
‘Of course there isn’t,’ Jane agreed as she tried hard not to shiver, even though Lydia had forced her to wear a hat too. Leo had grinned delightedly as he pulled a grey woollen beanie, unearthed from one of his bottomless drawers, onto her head. ‘Well, it’s no tiara,’ he’d said.
There was something different about Leo these last few days. It wasn’t just the new haircut and the way he suddenly looked different, all devastating angles and cheekbones. Despite everything, he seemed happier, stronger, more his own person.
She’d been so worried about breaking him that she hadn’t thought to worry about herself, which was a first. But now, after last night, after Charles…
‘Did I tell you about the refugees?’
She turned to look at Rose, who’d also been lost in her own thoughts. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘I used to visit them on my Thursday afternoons, which I had off from the café. It felt like the least I could do. All of them were so weak at first, but the children recovered very quickly and we’d come out here, though it was covered in piles of rubble, and play croquet. Just over there.’ Jane still wasn’t sure who Rose was talking about as the other woman pointed at a flowerbed where viburnum shrubs bloomed improbably pink in the fading afternoon light. ‘Madeleine and Gisèle had turned the back garden into a vegetable patch and Yves and Jacques were helping to renovate the house next door. It was very important for them to feel that they were repaying Edward in some small way, though I don’t think he felt the same way.’
‘You’ve never mentioned Edward before…’
‘Haven’t I? How odd! Most of the time I played with the little ones. Paul, Hélène and Thérèse, who some twenty years later would give birth to our Lydia.’
‘Really? You’ve known her long enough that you used to change her nappies?’
‘I have never changed a nappy in my life,’ Rose said with a little of that imperiousness which Jane aspired to. ‘One has to have some standards.’
‘I have to say, no disrespect to Lydia, but she’s terribly bossy to someone who’s known her since she was a snot-nosed little brat.’
‘You noticed that too.’ Rose allowed herself a small, dry smile. ‘So, this square, the house, it’s been my home for practically my entire life.’
‘I never had a home, just places that I lived in for a while,’ Jane said. She was raw enough today that she was sick of having to watch everything she said. ‘Home is where you feel safe, right? The only thing that makes me feel even a little bit safe is money. Once you have enough of it, you can do anything, go anywhere, be anyone you like. No one can stop you.’
‘You’re not there yet, then?’
Jane shook her head. ‘I have no idea how much it will take. Five million? Ten million? A billion ?’ She turned back to Rose, who was lucid again and looking at Jane as if she were some curiosity behind glass in a museum. ‘Does your money make you feel safe?’
‘I never really cared about the money. Oh, it’s nice to have and yes, it does cushion you a little, but there are some things even money can’t protect you from,’ Rose said and Jane didn’t know if she meant the way her body was breaking down or if she was talking about something in the past because Rose was getting that faraway look again. ‘I’ve always felt safest when I’m with the people I love. I’ve loved very well, not always wisely, and this house and the house at Lullington Bay are associated with some of the people that I loved so very much. That’s why they’re my safe places.’
After everything that had happened to her, there was no possibility that Jane was capable of love, but she was capable of kindness, even when there was nothing in it for her. Everyone deserved to feel safe – especially at their end. ‘I’ll make sure you stay here. No hospice. I promise. Whatever happens.’
‘Thank you,’ Rose said and then she took Jane’s hand and through their gloved fingers gripped her with a strength Jane hadn’t thought possible. ‘This last week or so, I see my loved ones all around me. At night, when I can’t sleep, I can see them in the walls.’
Rose might be getting that misty, unfocused look again but her voice was clear, so it was hard to know how to respond. ‘Oh, well… it’s probably just the new drugs you’re on, darling.’
‘No, I think they’re waiting for me. I thought I had more time than this. I would love to have a little bit more time. There are still so many loose ends to tie up.’ Rose placed her other hand over their clasped fingers. ‘Still, I don’t think I’ll have to bother with Christmas cards this year. Having to write them out was always such a bore.’
It was a relief that they were back to being flippant. ‘You probably won’t have to bother with buying Christmas presents either.’
‘Or eat Brussels sprouts. Never could stand them. They were the one thing that was in plentiful supply during the war.’
‘They’re not so bad if you take off all the outer leaves and fry them with bacon,’ Jane said and Rose wasn’t so far gone that she couldn’t give her an incredulous look. ‘Sometimes – not often, I admit it – I cook. Last year, before I met Leo of course, I cooked Christmas dinner for my boyfriend’s family.’ Jane laughed as she remembered it. ‘They didn’t really understand the concept of Christmas dinner. Kept saying it was too soon after Thanksgiving to have turkey again,’ she told Rose. ‘Jackie, Andrew’s mother, said that next year she’d give me her baked ham recipe and I could make that instead. I dodged a bullet there. Are you too cold, darling? Shall we go in now?’
Rose was staring at her incredulously again. ‘Gosh, you really are an odd duck,’ she said as if she were seventy years younger and she wasn’t talking to Jane but one of those ghosts of hers that lived in the walls.
Then, thank God, Leo was coming through the gate. ‘I hope you two aren’t talking about me,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Frank gave me a lift to the office. I’ve got everything you asked for and Liddy says it’s too cold and you have to come in now.’
&n
bsp; 29
September 1944
Rose sat on a wooden chair clutching a mug of tea that tasted faintly of Brussels sprouts as a lady from the WRVS asked her questions, each one punctuated with the word ‘dear’.
‘Do you have an address for Phyllis Carfax’s next of kin, dear?’
‘Do you know when Magda Novotny arrived in England? Is that the correct spelling of her surname, dear?’
‘Is it Sylvia or Sylvie, dear?’
‘Do you have your rent book, dear?’
Then she sent Rose off to the other end of the church hall to talk to an Information Officer. There were more questions, forms to be filled in, a card handed over with the address of the mortuary because Maggie – they kept calling her Magda even though she was Maggie – didn’t have any relatives to identify her body.
After the Last Dance Page 30