After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  She ran. Could hear barking and the dog, Killer, was coming after her. No, not after her but running with her because he hated Fat Alan as much as she did and at last he was free too.

  She kept on running, running, running beyond the confines of the estate, running until she hit the main road and pulled off her tracksuit top because it was covered in blood and threw it over a hedge then she ran until she got to the big supermarket and she slowed down and despite what she’d done, she was back to nothing and she could slip unseen onto a bus that was headed to the station amid a crowd of old ladies with shopping trollies and smokers’ coughs.

  Then she hid and waited until the train pulled into the platform. She got on the train. Found a seat and hunched herself up as small as she could and she stayed like that until the ticket collector came round and asked for her ticket and she pretended to ignore him. But he wouldn’t go away and then she saw that she was still holding all that money and that she could use some of it to buy a ticket but she didn’t need to, because someone said, ‘It’s all right. I’ll pay for her ticket,’ and that was when she met Charles.

  She was crying again, the tears slipping out along with her confession. The burden she’d carried on her back all these years… it had weighed her down. Crippled her. Made her hard. But even now, she didn’t feel sorry. She wasn’t ashamed of what she’d done. If she hadn’t killed Fat Alan, then she wouldn’t have been able to kill the shadow that she’d been. But the thing about shadows was that they had a way of reappearing whenever it got dark.

  ‘That’s it,’ Jane said. ‘That’s who I am. You know what I’m really like now.’

  She waited for Leo to look at her as if he couldn’t bear to look at her. Waited for him to turn away from her. To hate her. To pull her out from under the bed.

  But he was still lying on the floor, eyes fixed on her face. Then he stretched out his arm and she flinched away from him. ‘Jane, please,’ he said. Those two words gave nothing away. ‘I’ve lost loads of weight but I’m still too big to be able to get under the bed with you.’

  ‘You’re never as funny as you think you are,’ she told him, though somehow he’d managed to crack a smile from her frozen face. ‘You can’t hide behind a joke for ever.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m starting to get that,’ Leo said and he stretched out his arm again and this time she let him take hold of her hand. ‘It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right. You have to trust me on that.’

  Leo didn’t say anything else. He held her hand and stroked her knuckles over and over again, while she cried. Even once she’d managed to stop crying, he didn’t let go and Jane hoped that maybe they could stay like that for ever.

  Epilogue

  Lullington Bay

  In the end, they both chose not to be fucked up.

  Though Leo never realised how hard it would be to love someone who didn’t believe in love.

  Still, he’s fiercely glad of his love, though he never expected it to feel so sentimental, like a cheesy love song playing on the radio and leaking out of an open window on a sunny day.

  His love for Jane – and he winces even as he forms the thought – makes him want to be a better man. He can’t imagine that he’ll ever do drugs again. Not now that he knows what he knows. He’s only faltered once and that was one almighty alcohol-fuelled bender the night that Jane confessed her crimes. Her other crimes. The man that she’d jilted, not the other way round. The long con she’d been planning. Waiting it out so she could get a decent alimony payment from Rose’s estate.

  Leo had gone and got so drunk, he could hardly see straight. He’d come back, vomited on Rose’s roses and ended up comatose on the kitchen floor.

  Jane had been furious. ‘If you promise that you’ll never get like this again, then I promise that I’ll never keep another secret from you. You have to promise, Leo. I can’t be strong enough for both of us. I can’t do that any more.’

  Leo had promised because a world without Jane in it would be cold and lonely and a quick slide back into dirty old habits. But Jane tilts his world by one hundred and eighty degrees and she’s usually right about everything, apart from the times when she’s spectacularly wrong.

  Just as he builds houses, he’s building a life for the two of them. He wants to give Jane the things she’s never had, the kind of things that don’t cost money.

  Now that it’s summer at Lullington Bay, on the weekends he fills the house with people. George, of course, and Lydia and Frank who are renovating a guesthouse down the coast in Brighton; Mark and his family; Fergus and his wife and their three redheaded, freckle-faced little girls. Leo even invited his parents down, although that was two days of awkward silences, barbed remarks, passive-aggressive comments and one enormous row over Sunday lunch between him and his mother, while Jane and his father made their excuses and walked to the village pub, even though it was pissing down with rain, where they bonded over a mutual love of Ealing comedies and sticky toffee pudding.

  Now he Skypes his mother every Sunday afternoon and she knits coats for the two Staffie-cross puppies he and Jane found in a layby the time they went to see a man in Hayward’s Heath about some reclaimed timber.

  ‘But they have to stay downstairs, Leo,’ Jane had said the first night but she was always the one who got up to comfort them when they began to whimper and howl. Now they sleep in a basket next to their bed.

  It’s almost a family. It’s ties that bind them together.

  Leo’s still a gambling man, a risk taker. Jane might not know what love is but if he loves her hard enough and well enough, eventually even Jane has to give in. He’s counting on it.

  He’s put everything he has on red and he’s waiting for the wheel to stop spinning.

  It’s easy, the easiest thing in the world, to love Leo.

  He’s actually very loveable. Not in some sweet, saccharine way that involves date nights and flowers bought from petrol stations on a Friday evening. Or necklaces and cuddly toys that spell out ‘I love you’. That’s not their way.

  But love isn’t something Jane takes lightly. There’d been a time when she’d found it ridiculously easy to say ‘I love you’ because it wasn’t true, but when you thought it might be the greatest truth you’d ever told, it was very, very hard. Besides, once you’d told someone that you loved them and really, really meant it, you’d shown your entire hand and Jane has always played her cards close to her chest.

  For a long time after Rose’s death, it felt like Jane was holding her breath and she only let it out when Rose’s will could no longer be contested. When she told her lawyer, Mr Whipple, that she didn’t want a divorce. When Leo sat down with Charles, Rose’s executor, and said he wanted his inheritance placed in a trust, that he could manage on the salary he draws as what Rose stipulated in her will as an Executive Without a Briefcase. ‘You give me access to all that money and I might go off the rails,’ Leo had said. ‘I really don’t want to go off the rails.’

  With Leo’s salary and the interest Jane earns on the investments that Charles makes for her, they’re comfortable. They have a comfortable life. Sometimes what you think you want doesn’t come close to what you really need.

  Jane needs Leo now he’s the best version of himself. He uses his time wisely: working with Mark on converting an old art deco council block in Stoke Newington into homes for essential workers. Spends one day a week shadowing an architect and is forever taking meetings with people from the Tate Modern about an exhibition he’s curating of British Pop Art, mostly culled from Rose’s art collection.

  During the week they live in the little mews house in Kensington. Jane helps George pack up Rose’s house and takes classes, studies anatomy and makes notes as she trains to become a yoga instructor, then on Friday afternoon, they head down to Sussex.

  Lullington Bay is invariably full of people but Jane prefers it when it’s just her and Leo and their two silly dogs. They have a kitchen disco on Friday nights and Leo gets up early to go down to the
beach and paint the sea. Jane like the pictures he paints on overcast days the best.

  Mostly Jane lives for those long nights in Lullington Bay when she lies in bed in Leo’s arms, her hand over his heart. In those moments, she finally knows what safe feels like. Underneath the steady cadence of his breathing, she can hear the faint lap of the sea against the shore and it echoes in her head like the words she still hasn’t found the courage to say.

  I love you, I love you, I love you.

  Coda

  Rose is back on the dancefloor of Rainbow Corner, with the smell of brilliantine and sweat-soaked rayon catching at the back of her throat. The band plays on, ever on and on, light from the chandeliers glinting off the brass section as Rose is dipped and twirled and spun round.

  Everyone she loves is here. Reunited with her girls, her precious, precious girls. Sylvia, as beautiful and brilliant as ever, brushes past in the arms of a strapping GI. Phyllis waves each time Rose glides by, shouts something out that’s lost in the beat of the music and Maggie’s sitting with a drink in her hand and her smile is no longer a dark, secret thing.

  Sometimes she thinks she sees Danny. Men she danced with. Girls who gave her hankies, spare change, a shoulder to cry on. Gosh, even Shirley is here, absolutely splendid in her pale blue taffeta. But Rose only has eyes for Edward, who’s holding her in his arms and he hasn’t once stepped on her feet.

  She’s going to stay here for ever. Because Rainbow Corner never closes. They never turn anyone away.

  When they opened the doors of Rainbow Corner, they threw away the key.

  Author Note

  I have tried to be a stickler for accuracy in the historical sections of this novel. However, for the sake of dramatic licence: although the first V2 rockets were launched at London on 8th September, they didn’t fall on Holborn but Chiswick, killing three people, and Epping with no casualties.

  ‘Someday they’ll write stories about this place’

  How I came to fall in love with Rainbow Corner

  I don’t know if it’s because I read Noel Streatfeild’s When the Siren Wailed at an impressionable age but I’ve always been fascinated with what life was like for the people of Britain during World War Two. I’ve devoured countless novels, diaries and non-fiction about the Home Front and imagined that some day I would write a novel set in London during those tense, turbulent times.

  Then, a few years ago, I was watching a documentary series, The Making of Modern Britain , and saw a five-minute segment on a place called Rainbow Corner. It was a social club run by the American Red Cross which opened at the end of 1942 and was a place where American servicemen could go for a small slice of Americana.

  I couldn’t believe that in all my reading I’d never heard of Rainbow Corner. For years I’d worked on Orange Street, the other side of Leicester Square from where Rainbow Corner had once stood on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Denman Street. I’d walked past that very spot a hundred times and on Fridays I’d often gone to the New Piccadilly Café on Denman Street for a lunchtime fry-up.

  Rainbow Corner sparked something in me. I imagined a teenage girl watching a Pathé newsreel in a cinema far away from London and being just as transfixed by Rainbow Corner as I was some seventy years later. How her whole life would feel as if it were monochrome, drab and dreary until she stepped through the doors of Rainbow Corner and saw the whole world explode with colour, glamour and possibility.

  I started plotting a novel about the girl in that cinema desperate to run away to London and began to research Rainbow Corner in earnest.

  When America entered the Second World War in 1942 and American servicemen were stationed in Britain, they discovered a country battered by a brutal Nazi bombing campaign, strict food, petrol and clothing rationing and unfriendly natives. ‘Overpaid, oversexed and over here’ was how the British described the GIs, as the Americans were known, an abbreviation of ‘Government Issue’ because everything from their uniforms to their toilet roll was supplied by the US government.

  The American Red Cross were charged with the task of providing their servicemen with a taste of all the things they missed from back home. There were the famous Clubmobiles that welcomed the US troops at the docks and travelled to their bases, even following them to France after the invasion, to serve them coffee and doughnuts.

  There were also clubs for American servicemen, mostly in London, and the largest, most legendary one was Rainbow Corner. Originally a famous restaurant called Del Monico’s and an adjoining Lyons Corner House, Rainbow Corner was created as a Little America for all those GIs thousands of miles away from home.

  I didn’t have to make up any of the details about Rainbow Corner in After the Last Dance because Rainbow Corner really was that magical place. It had two dining rooms, a snack bar (Dunker’s Den) in the basement and, as far as I know, it was the first place in Britain to stock Coca-Cola. They held boxing and wrestling matches, and dances five nights a week where English hostesses like Rose, Sylvia, Maggie and Phyllis would jive with the soldiers. Even the Where Am I? room really existed.

  Rainbow Corner was a place where GIs could get their hair cut in the American style, their shoes shined, their cigarette lighters filled. Glenn Miller, Ed Murrow, Fred Astaire and countless other celebrities came to entertain the troops and when it opened on a foggy night in November 1942, they really did throw away the key as a symbolic gesture that for as long as US troops were fighting in Europe, Rainbow Corner would never turn any of them away.

  One of my most prized Rainbow Corner finds was a yellowed and musty copy of Picture Post magazine from April 1944 with a four-page story on the club, complete with photographs that I pored over. I scoured accounts from the women who worked there. I even tracked down an obscure 1946 film, I Live on Grosvenor Square , because the director had recreated the Rainbow Corner basement snack bar on a film set in Welwyn.

  My magic a-ha moment was when I discovered that Pathé had put their news archive online. There was a newsreel showing volunteers at Rainbow Corner helping GIs to wrap Christmas presents to be sent back home and a newsreel of the night that Rainbow Corner closed in February 1946.

  Hearing Eleanor Roosevelt speak the exact same words that I later transcribed for After the Last Dance , seeing the hordes of people standing out on the street as they finally locked those doors struck a chord deep in my heart and I truly understood what a special place Rainbow Corner had been for all the men and women that had visited.

  Many months later, when I was writing the chapter where Rainbow Corner closes, I watched the newsreel again. This time, I scoured the footage for Rose, for Mickey Flynn, for Edward, because they’d become as real to me as Rainbow Corner and when I heard Eleanor Roosevelt talk once again about its legacy, tears streamed down my cheeks. And I’m a stony-hearted non-crier.

  After Rainbow Corner closed, they put up a plaque at the site in 1949:

  THIS PLAQUE IS PLACED HERE AS A TRIBUTE TO ALL RANKS OF THE UNITED STATES SERVICES WHO KNEW THE ORIGINAL ‘RAINBOW CORNER ’.

  But in 1959 the Del Monico restaurant (and the plaque) was demolished to create a faceless office building.

  Now, it’s as if it never existed, but I think that the spirit of Rainbow Corner still survives. All of us yearn for somewhere that will never turn us away, that will always be open when we need a haven, a magical place where we can be our best selves.

  Sarra Manning, London, 2015

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Sarra Manning

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19<
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  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Epilogue

  Coda

  Author Note

  ‘Someday they’ll write stories about this place’