After the Last Dance (29 page)

How could they have known when Jane and Leo flanked Rose on her slow, slow walk back to the house that it would be the last time she went outside?

The next day, Sunday, Rose was too tired to go to Lullington Bay. On Monday morning, she said that she'd go to the office after lunch but she didn't. Nor Tuesday either and so for the rest of the week, and the week after that, the office came to her. Fergus would pop round in the mornings for an hour and Leo would stop by after lunch with papers, plans, paint and tile samples and leave not with a series of instructions that had to be followed to the letter but with Rose saying, ‘Just do what you think best, dear. Talk to Fergus if you're not sure.'

Each day brought a new development, a new symptom of decline that drew Rose's end ever closer: the first day she didn't come downstairs, the untouched breakfast tray, the call to Jane on the house phone to ask for help in shuffling from sofa to bathroom. George still came round for dinner and Rose would talk about Rainbow Corner but she was starting to repeat herself.

Yet, Rose was still unmistakably Rose. Still had all her marbles and could still change her will while she was of sound mind. Add a codicil that granted a favourable bequest to her troubled but much adored great-nephew. But Jane had other problems that were weighing far heavier on her.

She turned up at Charles's office at the end of the first week of December. He worked out of three interlinking rooms on the ground floor of a Georgian townhouse near the American Embassy, though this late on a Friday afternoon it was just Charles and his personal assistant, her understated beauty understated even further by heavy black-framed glasses and an unflatteringly tight updo.

Charles didn't run the kind of business that catered for walk-ins, but the woman didn't even ask if Jane had an appointment. She rang through to Charles, then showed Jane through the middle room stuffed full of filing cabinets and into his inner sanctum.

He didn't seem surprised by Jane's sudden visit. Why would he, when he knew enough to destroy her? With little effort, Charles could easily dismantle the shiny life Jane had built because it often seemed to her that it was held together by hairspray, sugar-free chewing gum and oh yes, a web of lies. Instead he simply said, ‘Hello. I was hoping we might see each other again.'

He walked around his desk and gestured at one of two black leather club chairs. Asked Jane if she wanted something to drink. Then they sat and had a perfectly friendly conversation about Rose and about the bloody weather again and all the time Charles looked at her with sad eyes and Jane was sure that only under extreme interrogation, maybe even waterboarding, would he admit how he really felt about her. Even then he'd say something so typically Charles-like: ‘I could never be angry with you. I'm just a little disappointed.'

She couldn't put it off any longer. ‘I came here because I need to talk to you.'

Jane's hands were sweating, so she tucked them against her sides. She'd never apologised to anyone before. But then, she'd never stuck around long enough to say sorry. Once her crimes had been discovered, she was already gone. Anyway, an apology was really an admission of guilt and Jane had nothing to feel guilty about – that was what she'd always told herself. The decisions she made, the havoc she sometimes wrought on other people, were beyond her control.

And in some ways they were. Every punch, every slap, every kick, every other…… cruelty that had been inflicted on her had made her what she was, but Charles had been her salvation. He'd all but killed her with kindness and Jane had let herself conveniently forget that, but being back in London had brought constant reminders of him, of how she'd hurt him when he hadn't deserved to be hurt. So, for some reason that she couldn't, wouldn't, analyse, she wanted, no,
needed
to make amends with Charles.

Jane took a steadying breath. ‘I wanted to tell you that when I left… before I left, I should have…' God, it was hard, but Charles was already shaking his head.

‘We don't have to do this, you and I,' he said softly but firmly and Jane should have been relieved – that his part of her slate was wiped clean. But she could feel panic rising up in her.

‘We do. I do. I never thanked you for saving my life, because that's what you did.' Her words were pitched so low, throat throbbing and prickling as if the tears weren't far off.

Charles got up from his chair to kneel at her feet and asked, ‘May I?'

Jane held out her hands and Charles took them and Jane wondered what might have happened, how different her life might have been, if she'd have let Charles take her hands all those years ago. Now she clung to his touch, his never-wavering touch. Lowered her head because she couldn't bear to look at him, to see anything even approaching pity in his eyes, then she felt his lips ghost against her knuckles so briefly that she might even have simply imagined it.

‘I don't deserve that much credit,' Charles said, after Jane had freed herself and he was sitting in his chair, their hands by their sides again. ‘When you got on that train you saved your own life and Jane, I think you must have realised, long before I did, that once you were saved we couldn't carry on as we were.'

They'd carried on as they were for two years, Charles still trying to mould her, to shape her life along the narrow lines of his own ordered existence, so who could blame her for starting to resist? To chafe against the bit? She liked Charles. Maybe in her own broken way, she'd even tried to love him, but that didn't mean she had to stay with him.

Rafe was young and handsome in a slick, Eurotrashy sort of way and he'd looked at Jane like he couldn't even believe that he was lucky enough to breathe the same air as her.

They'd met over the garden fence. Rafe had friends who lived next door and made Charles as angry as Jane had ever seen him with their raucous parties that went on all night and their guests who would never speak but roar in loud confident voices and throw up in the street. But Rafe wasn't like that. He was quiet, adoring and very persistent. And his parents were very, very rich. They'd even paid Jane off with a flat in Primrose Hill when it looked like she was going to become a permanent fixture, but that was a year further down the line.

To start with, it had been a whirlwind courtship conducted during daylight hours when Charles was at work and Jane was left to her own devices; Charles probably thought that she was arranging flowers and looking for recipes and all the other little tasks that made up her continued quest for self-improvement. Instead she was taken to Cowdray Park to sip champagne and watch Rafe play polo. Flown to Paris for lunch. Bought her first diamond. And all she had to do in return was thank Rafe with a kiss that meant more to him than the diamond did to her.

Leaving Charles wasn't a decision Jane had taken lightly, but she'd taken it all the same. She had form and at least this time she left a note in the unformed, ugly scrawl that was one of the few things she couldn't improve on.
Thanks for all that you did
, the note had said. Maybe she should have enlarged on that theme, spun it out over several sheets of Charles's finest linen bond paper, but it still came down to those six words to encompass how he'd saved her.

‘I'm sorry about how I left. I want you to know that.' And she'd said it now and she couldn't believe it was that easy. Maybe she'd start saying sorry more often now.

‘You left on a Friday,' Charles said, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond Jane. ‘It was June. It was so sunny, hot, and you'd mentioned getting out of London, that you'd only seen the sea once. I'd left work early, booked two rooms at a place in Brighton and thought that we might drive down there that evening. As soon as I opened the door, before I even saw your note, I knew you'd gone.'

It turned out that it wasn't that easy. It wasn't easy at all. ‘Charles, please…'

‘We couldn't have carried on as we were, but were you not happy? Was it something I did? Something I said? Did I give you a reason not to trust me?' Charles still wouldn't look at her and his tone, his endless unbearable questions weren't relentless, but resigned, rehearsed as if he'd lain awake reliving the moment when he'd come home to find her gone. And still he continued. ‘What was so special about that boy – because I did know about him, you weren't as good at covering your tracks as you thought you were. Two years we spent together and then you left me six words on a piece of paper, Jane. I thought I was worth more than that.'

Jane covered her face with her icy cold hands. ‘I can't help what I am, Charles. I did a bad thing to you, I know, but that doesn't make me a bad person.'

‘That's an excuse, it's not a reason,' Charles said gently and it was that gentleness that threatened to break her, make the sobs rise up.

Six words weren't enough. Sorry wasn't enough. She owed him some kind of explanation. ‘You see, with you, I wasn't scared any more but I still didn't feel safe,' Jane said haltingly. ‘I still felt as if the world could crash down on top of me at any second and I thought that if I had money, if I was with someone who had lots of money, more money than you, then it would cushion the blow. Money gives you security. It makes you bombproof, I've always thought that, though lately I wonder how true that is.'

‘Nobody is bombproof,' Charles said. ‘Everyone can be hurt no matter how much money they have.'

‘And I hurt you and I am so very sorry, Charles… I don't what else to say but sorry. Don't know how to make that word mean everything it should.' She was starting to sound pleading, tearful. ‘You have to believe me.'

‘I do. It's all right. Apology accepted,' Charles said hurriedly as if he couldn't stand to hear another word, but Jane wasn't done. She'd come this far and now she had no choice but to doggedly trudge on.

‘There's something else. The first night… you must have wondered… I mean I had blood on me… my clothes, my hands and you never even… you didn't…' It was an ungainly rush of words vomiting out of her, both of them in disbelief that she was saying this. Going there.

‘Jane, please stop now,' Charles whispered. ‘I can't do this.'

‘But I have to.' She hardly recognised her own voice, the manic, desperate,
lost
cadence to it. ‘Because I also wondered about you. When you gave me the knife that first night and you told me to sleep with it so I'd feel safe. I need to know what happened to you.'

‘I can't. You can't expect me to…'

‘But…'

‘I'm not brave like you. Please, Jane, if you ever cared anything for me, you will drop this.'

Jane held out her hands towards him, imploringly, but Charles shook his head and his face, his kind, gentle face, was on the brink of collapse, so she dropped it.

‘You're right,' she said. ‘Let's not do this any more.'

Charles nodded. He crossed one knee over the other, found a smile.

‘So, Rose was telling me that you've been helping her go through her attics and that you found a whole collection of taxidermy that she has absolutely no memory of buying.'

They had another perfectly lovely chat, though that made Jane want to cry too, then Charles walked her out. ‘By the way,' he said, just before she left, one foot already over the threshold. ‘I liked your Leo. I liked him a lot.'

It was raining outside. Pouring. Heavy and biblical. Jane didn't have an umbrella. Didn't want to take a taxi. She felt… didn't even know how she felt, but as she walked she wondered if she was crying or if it was just the rain on her face. By the time she reached Kensington, she'd decided that there was no point in feeling guilty any more. It was easy when your feelings didn't run that deep in the first place. She couldn't help that there was something missing, something in her internal wiring not properly connected. Not her fault at all.

As soon as she opened the front door, Jane could tell that something was wrong. The house could speak volumes and it was silently screaming at her.

Jane took the stairs two at a time. Once she was past the first floor, she could hear a raspy sort of shouting, which got louder as she ran up the last flight of stairs and down the corridor to Rose's sitting room.

Lydia, Agnieska, one of the agency nurses who came to give Rose her injection, and Leo, with a stricken look on his face, were standing there as Rose shouted at him.

‘It's you! You've done this to me! I was fine until you came back. Why did you come back?'

‘Rose, you know why I came back.' He choked on every word. ‘Because I care about you.'

‘You care about my money. Well, you're not getting a penny!'

Rose was locked in a grotesque, hunched crouch as she tried to lift herself off the sofa. But worse was the look on her face. Like a terrified, cornered animal, wild and yet caged.

Jane had to say something to stop Rose looking like that. ‘That's not true, darling. Leo's here because he wanted to make things right with you.'

Rose turned accusing eyes on Jane standing in the doorway. ‘You! Who
are
you? The two of you are in cahoots with each other. You're trying to finish me off. You're poisoning me!'

And for the finale she struggled to her feet, and then crumpled with a startled cry, ending up on her knees as they all rushed forwards.

It felt like a long time before Agnieska had finished checking over a now compliant, placid Rose, no bones broken, no harm done, except for Rose's panting breaths.

Rose suddenly sank back and for one heart-skipping moment Jane thought that she'd gone. Then her eyes opened. ‘I hate you all,' she said petulantly. ‘Leave me alone. Get out!'

‘Enough, Rose,' Lydia said calmly. ‘You don't hate us and no one is here to hurt you.'

‘I'm all alone.' Rose's voice quavered. ‘I don't have a friend left in the world.'