After the Last Dance (5 page)

‘You're scratchy,' she murmured and he kissed her better. Kissed her neck, nuzzled against her pulse point, which was beating out its own frantic little rhythm, along her jaw, to her mouth, which curved into a tiny smile.

Jane was breathing heavier now. Her lips parted and he stopped. Body still pressed against her, but he wasn't kissing her any more and she pouted.

‘You're so beautiful,' he said and for once, it wasn't just a line. ‘I know I keep saying it, but you are and I want you so badly. I'm hard just looking at you.'

‘Are you, darling?' She bit her lip. ‘Just from looking?'

‘Yeah, imagine that.' Even though he'd been working her, teasing her, building her up for the last half-hour, and her dress was wilting, wisps of hair escaping from that tightly wound, honey-blonde coronet, her make-up practically a memory, there was still something untouchable about her.

Leo took Jane's hand, which was warm and a little sweaty, and kissed her palm before he placed it on his crotch. Her fingers clutched convulsively and her tongue crept out to moisten her lips.

She wasn't
that
untouchable.

He lowered his head, so his mouth was against her ear and he could whisper, ‘Can you feel how much I want you? Do you want me too?'

She shut her eyes, her fingers clutched once more and his dick got harder, throbbed against her touch. Then she took her hand away and his heart skipped one painful beat until she threw her arms round him.

‘Yes! Oh, yes!'

Leo didn't bother teasing her any more, but kissed her hard and Jane kissed him right back. He walked her over to the huge bed, mounted on a dais, swathed in swagging and tiny pillows and didn't stop kissing her, so she wouldn't have time to think.

But she was right there with him, happy to fall back on the bed, twisting underneath him as he fucked her mouth with his tongue. Leo wanted his mouth on her breasts next, but he'd seen the impossible number of tiny silk-covered buttons that held the bodice of her dress together and it would take too long to undo them. Long enough that Jane might change her mind, and he needed this. On a day of a week of a month that melted into all the other months and became years when he never got what he wanted, never achieved anything much, some strange twist of fate had let him get
this
girl.

‘You're fucking perfect,' he breathed into her skin as he mouthed the top of her breasts and he started to tug down the bodice of her dress. Jane froze.

‘No, don't, darling,' she said. ‘It's vintage. You might tear it.'

‘I really want to get you naked.'

‘And I really want you to kiss me again,' she said and he could do that and she didn't mind when he pulled up all those yards of silk tulle and taffeta and settled himself between her legs.

Jane hummed as he ground against her, lifted herself up so he could pull down the wisp of white satin and lace that covered her. He pressed his palm against her, she was bare and smooth; not quite wet enough, but he worked her with his hand. One finger inside her, thumb rubbing against her clit and she whimpered a little, eyes screwed tight shut.

‘You really
are
good at this, aren't you?' she said, her voice thick.

She tasted like blackcurrants too when he sucked the finger that had been inside her into his mouth. He thought about going down on her, he never minded that, quite liked it, sometimes he even loved it, but she was wet now. She didn't need it and he really needed to get some.

‘I'll die if I don't get inside you,' he said, as he placed his thumb just shy of her clit so she wriggled to try to get him where she wanted him. ‘I can't wait to fuck you.'

‘I don't want you to die.' She arched her hips. ‘God, I think
I
might die.'

‘Do you want it? Do you want me?' Leo said but Jane didn't answer, because she'd arched her back to a point where it looked painful.

He pressed his thumb against her clit again, let her ride it a little, but when she arched her back again, whimpered again, as if she was going to go without him, he stopped.

‘Yes. I want you! Please. I do want it.'

He could do this with his eyes shut, one hand tied behind his back. Could keep her right up there, teetering but not going over the edge, as he fucked her with two fingers now, while his other hand groped in his back pocket for a condom, tore the foil with his teeth, unbuttoned and unzipped. He took her limp hand and put on his cock, closed his fingers around hers as she jacked him off. Then the condom was on and he was so hard that he hurt from it, could feel the ache deep in his balls, and sliding deep into her was the only thing able to save him.

She was tight. Even tighter when she gripped him, wrapped her legs around him. Leo hadn't even taken his jeans off and she deserved someone who'd do it sweet and slow, make love to her. But he couldn't be that guy.

So he pulled out then slammed back in and she shut her eyes and gripped him even tighter though he hadn't thought that was possible.

Then her eyes opened. ‘Oh, darling, is fucking me into the mattress another one of those things you're really good at?' she purred with a cat-like smile. ‘Go on, then. Show me what you've got.'

 

Rose thought about going back to Durham many, many times. When she had telephoned home on that first uncertain grey London morning a month ago, everyone had been out except Shirley, who'd screamed at Rose for borrowing her dresses. She'd said that if Rose did come back, she was going to be confined to her bedroom knitting balaclavas until they could ship her off to the Land Girls, if Father didn't have her arrested first.

Rose hadn't called home since. She was managing perfectly fine on her own. She'd found a job in a café in Soho, owned and run by a Mr and Mrs Fisher. She did everything from waiting tables to battling with the cantankerous hot water urn to make tea, peeling vegetables and washing up. By lunchtime her feet ached and her hands were now red raw and split in places from scrubbing at pots and pans.

Every day Rose enquired about vacancies at the Lyons Corner House on Tottenham Court Road. She'd much rather be a Nippy in a neat black dress instead of wearing a stained pinny over an old summer frock and cardigan. She was paid two pounds a week plus tips, which were so scarce as to be non-existent, and rented a shared room with half board in a house just off the Edgware Road for one pound and ten shillings a week, which didn't leave much for her to live on.

Her landlady Mrs Cannon was thin and mean-looking and had commandeered Rose's ration book. She had to be at the café for seven every morning and Mrs Cannon left her out one measly slice of bread with a scraping of margarine for breakfast. When she got home from work at five, there'd be a bowl of stew with a lot of cabbage floating in it and a few pieces of something grey and both gelatinous and gristly. Rose was never sure if it was meat or fish.

But she got a decent lunch every day and the girl she shared her room with, Olive, volunteered as a roof spotter. The two of them would set the alarm for eight o'clock in the evening and go straight to bed, after their bowl of tasteless, indeterminate stew, for a nap.

At eight-thirty Olive would jump on the trolleybus to the City for her shift and Rose would head back into town. After two weeks, she'd stopped trying to get into Rainbow Corner. It was impossible without finding a GI willing to sign you in and those sharp-looking girls thronging the spider's web of streets around Piccadilly Circus didn't take kindly to newcomers trying to queer their pitch.

Those girls all had flashlights they shone on their ankles every time a man in uniform passed. They did things in doorways with soldiers too. Even though the doorways were in shadow, the noises from the couples, a hint of a bare leg braced, made Rose hurry past, eyes averted, and on the evening she saw two girls fall to the ground kicking, spitting and hair-pulling as they fought over the attentions of a skinny GI with a huge nose and buck teeth, she'd wondered if maybe one glorious night in Rainbow Corner was all she was ever meant to have.

Rose had even gone all the way back to King's Cross to see if she could find a GI at the source, but the ones she shyly approached either weren't going to Rainbow Corner or got completely the wrong idea about her. One of them had suddenly produced a nylon stocking like a magician pulling scarves out of a seemingly empty pocket. ‘You want the other one, honey, then why don't you and me take a little walk?'

But at least there were still places, lots of them, where she could dance. Rose had become quite adept at jiving under the tutelage of the men she danced with at the Paramount or at Frisco's when she ventured back to Piccadilly. She'd also got awfully good at fending off advances from spotty young men who told her they were going off to fight for her. It was no wonder that she preferred to dance with negroes.

The negroes that Rose danced with all called her ‘ma'am' and when they weren't dipping and twirling her – and on one glorious occasion actually lifting her over a pomaded head – would only touch her elbow to guide Rose off a sprung dancefloor, which sagged and groaned with the weight of all the spinning couples.

Tonight, with Kathy, who worked in the tobacconist's two doors down from the café, Rose was going to the Bouillabaisse Club in New Compton Street. ‘They play jazz all night,' Kathy told Rose as they queued to get in. ‘Do you love jazz? I do.'

‘It's my most absolute favourite thing in the world,' Rose assured her, though she didn't really care what they played as long as the music had a beat that she could dance to. Soon she was in the arms of a strapping Jamaican called Cuthbert.

When she was dancing, the horrors of Rose's new life – the hunger, the what-was-to-become-of-her, and the fear of being dragged back to her old life and the terrible retribution that awaited – all receded.

Her feet stopped hurting and did all sorts of tricksy, quicksilver things that she didn't know they could do and Cuthbert had gleaming white teeth and told her that she was pretty as he spun her round again and again. Shirley's pale blue taffeta dress was growing limper by the day
.

After an hour of dancing, Cuthbert said he'd ‘be happy to procure the finest ginger beer money can buy' while Rose went to the Ladies' to do something with her hair.

The tiny cloakroom was heaving with girls either queuing for the one lavatory or fighting for space in front of a mirror. Rose got trapped between two girls debating the merits of gravy browning versus cold tea as make-do stockings ‘if you can't find a Yank'.

‘I'd rather use gravy browning than get a pair of nylons off a Yank and a dose of the clap,' one of the girls muttered darkly. Rose tried not to look shocked. She was a doctor's daughter, after all. There'd been two books in her father's study that were kept locked in his desk drawer, but he always put the key in his brass pen tidy and when he was at one of his Rotary Club or Freemason's meetings, Mother always went to bed early, so Rose wasn't entirely ignorant of the ways of flesh. Still, there were things one simply didn't say in public.

She gave both of them a wide berth until they vacated the space in front of the mirror. Her poker-straight hair was, as usual, escaping from the four pins that were all she had left. It was no less manageable for being washed under the cold tap because Mrs Cannon charged an extra shilling a week for access to barely lukewarm water for an hour every day.

Rose patted down her red cheeks and her sweaty forehead with powder from the gilt and paste compact Shirley had given her for her sixteenth birthday even though Mother had said she was too young and that the compact looked common. She was still flushed and glowing and there were damp patches on the pale blue taffeta from where she'd —

‘I say, could I possibly beg just a smidge of your lippy?'

Rose looked up to see a girl standing behind her. She had china-blue eyes in a pretty doll-like face and hair like Jean Harlow, which Rose was sure was bleached. Women who bleached their hair were also common, but this girl certainly didn't sound like the brassy girls who came into the café or regularly blocked Rose's view of the mirror in the dancehalls of London.

When Rose tentatively smiled at her, she smiled back. ‘Be my guest,' Rose said and she handed over her precious tube of Max Factor Tru-Color in pillar-box red. As soon as she gave it to the other girl, Rose wanted to snatch it back. Instead she watched anxiously as it was sparingly applied to a mouth that would be described in a novel as bee-stung.

‘You're an angel.' The girl pressed her lips together to spread the colour. ‘So, what did you do to get a tube of Max Factor?'

‘What did I do? Oh! Well, nothing really. My friend Patience, her sister Prudence works in a munitions factory. All the girls were given a tube as a thank-you for doing their bit but Prudence has religious objections to wearing make-up and their parents said Patience was too young, so they gave it to me.'

‘What rot. I can't imagine God caring whether a girl wears a little powder and paint. Surely He has more important things to worry about.'

Rose nodded. ‘You'd think, wouldn't you?'

They smiled at each other again. ‘It's awfully hard having a conversation with someone's reflection,' the other girl said, ‘and we're creating a terrible bottleneck.'

‘How annoying!' Rose shoved comb, compact and lipstick back in her handbag and turned away from the mirror to follow the girl out into the little antechamber that led back into the club. ‘I'm Rose, by the way.'

‘Sylvia!' It was a shriek, as a burly man in sailor's uniform had come up behind Sylvia and lifted her off her feet. ‘Lovely to meet you. Thanks for the lippy!' Her words were swallowed up as she was carried off.

Cuthbert was waiting patiently for Rose by the bar with the promised ginger beer and as soon as she'd gulped it down, she was back in his arms.

They only had time for one fast jive before Sylvia tapped Cuthbert on the shoulder. ‘Mind if I cut in?' she shouted, her arms already around Rose's waist. ‘We need another girl to make up the numbers.'

‘Make sure you bring my Rosie back in one piece,' Cuthbert said but he was already eyeing the girls lining the edge of the dancefloor, shifting their weight from foot to foot as they looked for a spare man. Rose didn't think that Cuthbert would wait for her again.

‘Not sure if you needed rescuing but I've got a GI, six foot four inches, who's getting a crick in his neck from having to dance with so many short girls. Also some of the girls here are funny about dancing with a negro.'

Kathy had been funny about dancing with negroes. She'd said none of them washed properly, which wasn't true, because every one that Rose had danced with had been immaculately turned out, but Kathy had disappeared with a gum-chewing lance corporal within five minutes of them arriving, which had left Rose free to dance with whomever she chose.

Now she was introduced to a grinning, debonair GI called Ray, who kissed her hand, told her she looked like Hedy Lamarr, asked if she could jive then pulled her onto the dancefloor where he lifted Rose up as if she was as light as thistledown and swung her over his head. She just had time and the presence of mind to tuck her legs in so she didn't kick his ears.

By the time the band decided to take a break, the bodice of the pale blue taffeta was soaked through, the ends of Rose's hair sopping wet. It was so hot and humid in the tiny club that condensation dripped from the ceiling and most of the soldiers had removed their jackets. The place reeked of mildew and sweat.

‘Over here!' Sylvia waved frantically from a far corner. ‘Rose! Ray!'

She let Ray lead her through the mass of resting dancers; girls with their hands on their knees as they tried to catch their breath, men mopping at their foreheads with handkerchiefs.

‘Billy got you a drink,' Sylvia said to Rose as soon as they reached her table. Rose didn't know who Billy was and the glass thrust at her contained a lukewarm liquid that tasted even viler than the Coca-Cola she'd had at Rainbow Corner. ‘Gin and French. Divine, isn't it?'

‘Oh, it's my absolute favourite,' Rose said. She let Ray light a cigarette for her and find her a chair and it wasn't until she was sitting down and taking cautious sips of her drink and hesitant puffs of her cigarette that she noticed the other two girls. One was blonde, though not as blonde as Sylvia, and had a jutting bosom displayed in all its glory in an emerald satin frock and the other one was thinner, darker; she was dressed all in black and looked terribly chic.

‘Phyllis.' Sylvia gestured at the blonde, then at the dark-haired girl. ‘Maggie. This is Rose. She let me have a dab of lipstick and she knows how to jive.'

Rose resisted the urge to wriggle her shoulders as Phyllis and Maggie looked her over. ‘It's very nice to meet you,' she said.

‘How old are you?' Maggie said. Rose thought she had an accent but it was hard to know for certain as the band had started playing again.

‘I'm nineteen.'

Maggie looked at Rose's sweat-stained dress, the hair that had once again broken free of its moorings and didn't say anything, but glanced at Phyllis, her eyebrows raised.

‘So have you decided what you'll do when you get drafted next year?' Phyllis asked. Rose hadn't because she was still three years off twenty, and the war couldn't last another three years, though often it seemed as if it would last for ever.

‘Anything but the Land Girls,' she said fervently but she didn't want them to think that the only thing she was doing for the war effort was dancing with soldiers on leave. ‘I've only been in London for a few weeks but now I've settled in, I'm looking for some volunteer work.' Phyllis and Maggie still had pursed lips, which wasn't very encouraging. ‘Olive, the girl I room with, spends three nights on duty as a roof spotter. She says it was quiet for ages, but it's got quite lively recently.'

In Durham, the bombing had become so sporadic that Rose's father even stored his bicycle in their air raid shelter, which would have been unthinkable two years ago. But in the few weeks that she'd been in London, Rose had got used to the whine of the siren again and having to feel her way down three flights of stairs in the dark to the damp cellar. She still wasn't used to the terrifying crackle and pop of the anti-aircraft guns, though, or seeing the sky lit up so brightly. Not just from the city blazing with fire from the bombs that rained down, but from the ghostly glowing beams of the searchlights picking out the German planes.

There was something to be said for spending most of her nights in dimly lit basements where the band and the thud of feet drowned out the sound of the world outside. Most times, when they let off the sirens, they were a distant wail and everyone carried on dancing.

But that wasn't important now, when Phyllis was glaring at her as if she'd confessed to something awful like having a secret Nazi lover or trading on the black market. Maggie wasn't looking too thrilled either and Sylvia wasn't any help as she had her back to the three of them while she talked to two airmen. ‘Have I said something to offend you?' Rose asked timidly.