Although it was against the rules, when Rose turned up at Rainbow Corner late that Saturday afternoon after she’d left Edward’s flat, shell-shocked and shaking, the other girls made a cosy den for her in the Where Am I? room. Rose stayed there for three days, which passed in a blur of staring at the walls, endless cups of tea and people popping in to tell Rose how sorry they were.
She was also visited there by one of the grandest of the American Red Cross ladies, whose sister was married to someone very high up at the War Office, almost as high as Winston Churchill himself. The woman sat on the bed next to Rose, took her hand and whispered in Rose’s ear that it hadn’t been a gas line explosion but a bomb like nothing anyone had seen before. A V2, Hitler’s ‘vengeance rocket’, his secret weapon, which had always been something of a national joke as they’d all speculated on what old Adolf would pull out for his final act.
Soon the room was needed again for GIs who were too inebriated to make it to their billets and Rose moved into the house in Kensington. She slept in a back bedroom on one of the camp beds donated by Phyllis, which smelt of paraffin wax. It was there that the items salvaged from Montague Terrace were delivered. ‘You’re a very lucky girl,’ a man from the Civil Defence Squad said as the wardrobe and drawers were hefted up the stairs. ‘Still got most of your clothes in here. That’s more than a lot of people have, you know.’
Sylvia’s crocodile skin attaché case had also been saved, and wrapped in a torn, dirty sheet, torn and dirty itself, was Shirley’s limp blue taffeta dress. It had been hanging on the back of the bedroom door and had stayed there even when the door was blown into a back garden three streets away.
Shirley’s pale blue taffeta might well outlive them all, Rose thought, and it was oddly comforting to walk around in her dead friends’ clothes. Still having part of them, even if it was just things, meant Rose had something to pass on to the people who were left behind.
After Maggie’s funeral, her émigré friends invited Rose to the wake in a tiny basement bar in Bayswater. Rose sat and drank vodka with them and they told her what little they knew about Maggie. She’d studied art at the Prague School; her father had taught philosophy at the university. When Hitler had invaded the Sudetenland in 1938, Maggie had dyed her hair blonde and got to Paris on false papers. She’d run far and fast from the Nazis but they’d still got her in the end.
There was a redheaded woman who’d known Maggie in Prague and had worked with her at the BBC who didn’t say a word while everyone else talked about Maggie. But when Rose gave her Maggie’s beaten copper wrist cuff and the handkerchief she’d embroidered, though Rose really wanted to keep them for herself, the woman kissed Rose on the lips, then stood up and walked away.
Next was Sylvia’s funeral. Sylvia’s people were from Hoxton, where Mickey Flynn said even he wouldn’t go after dark. Rose knew Sylvia wasn’t top drawer. She’d mentioned a kindly uncle ‘who lifted me out of the gutter as kindly uncles are wont to do’ but that was with a wink and a nudge so Rose had decided that, strictly speaking, he hadn’t been an uncle at all.
What was left of Sylvia was put in a mahogany coffin and carried by a horse-drawn hearse, black feather plumes dancing in the breeze. Propped up against the coffin was a floral tribute, RIP Our Syl , spelt out in white chrysanthemums. It was the flowers that nearly did for Rose but Sylvia wouldn’t have wanted her to cry. ‘Chin up, darling,’ she’d have said. ‘What a waste of mascara.’
There was nothing special about a funeral procession, not these days, but as they made painfully slow progress along the New North Road towards the church, people stopped, took off their hats and bowed their heads as Sylvia passed.
‘She’d have got a kick out of this,’ Rose said to Mickey but he said that Sylvia would have much preferred to have her ashes scattered over the dancefloor of the Embassy Club than buried in the graveyard of St John the Baptist church.
The wake was at the George and Vulture on Pitfield Street. Rose and Mickey sat in the corner surrounded by a press of people all having a whale of a time, until the crowd suddenly parted to let through a middle-aged man and woman. The man had a big red angry face and had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves to show meaty forearms covered in crude tattoos. By contrast, his wife was so thin that her shoulders looked like coat hangers in her black dress,
‘You knew our girl? Our Syl?’ the man demanded and Rose wanted to shrink back but Mickey gave her hand a warning squeeze and she nodded.
‘Yes.’ She couldn’t make her voice any louder than a whisper. ‘She was… I…’ It was impossible to sum up what Sylvia, lovely, lithe, larger-than-life Sylvia, had meant to her. ‘She was my friend. My very dear friend.’
Rose was hauled out of her chair and paraded around the room. Introduced to uncles and aunts and cousins and friends of the family as ‘one of our Syl’s friends from Up West.’ They all shook her hand and a woman even bobbed as if Rose were one of the young princesses. But when Rose gave Sylvia’s parents their daughter’s gold locket and powder compact, her mother made an awful noise, a keening, that made all the hairs on the back of Rose’s neck stand up. Mrs Crapper suddenly clasped her hand over her heart and was then swallowed up by a gaggle of female relatives who spirited her away and Rose was left with her husband, who looked even bigger and redder and angrier.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in the same hoarse whisper. ‘I just thought you might like to have them. I didn’t mean…’
His face suddenly crumpled like a paper bag crushed in a careless fist. ‘Syl, she always said you were like a little sister to her.’ Tears streamed down his bulbous cheeks. Rose watched aghast, tears spilling unchecked down her own face too, as the huge brute of a man was brought to his knees. He went down hard and when Rose crouched down to make sure he was all right, he seized her hand in a punishing grip. ‘You’re family now,’ he said as if he dared Rose to defy him. ‘If you ever need anything… anything. You get yourself down to Hoxton and ask for Henry Crapper.’
There was only Phyllis’s funeral left but Rose wasn’t allowed the time off work. ‘We’re sorry about your friends, of course we are, but it’s not like they were family,’ Mrs Fisher told her. ‘Besides, there’s nothing like a bit of hard work to take your mind off things.’
The day before the funeral, as arranged, Lady Carfax walked into the café as if she were walking into Claridge’s. She sat at a table surrounded by market traders and office workers and sipped tea from a chipped mug as she waited for Rose to finish washing up.
Rose would never have expected Lady Carfax to take hold of her reddened hands and not let go. It seemed entire lifetimes ago that she’d gone down to Norfolk with Phyllis and Lady Carfax had been an austere chilly presence looking down her patrician nose at Rose. Now she’d aged ten years in the preceding months.
‘The last time you saw her, was she happy?’ she asked.
Rose thought of Phyllis standing outside Rainbow Corner with Maggie and Sylvia, waving Rose off with her wide, toothy smile.
‘She was very happy,’ she said as fervently as she could. ‘And they said… that… she… they wouldn’t have… they were asleep when the bomb went off. They wouldn’t have woken up. Wouldn’t have felt a thing.’
Rose had to believe that death had been swift and merciful.
She hadn’t been able to find anything of Phyllis’s so Rose gave Lady Carfax the little gold and pearl brooch her parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She’d never found it quite so hard to lie before. ‘Phyllis always wore this,’ she said. ‘She’d want you to have it.’
‘You expect to lose your sons in a war,’ Lady Carfax said heavily. ‘That would have been easier, I think. But not Phyllis. Not my little girl.’
Then she’d left to accompany her little girl’s broken body back home so she could be buried in the family plot in the local churchyard.
There was just one more visitor. Mr Winthrop surprised Rose late the next afternoon as she was putting chairs on tables so she could mop the floor and though Mrs Fisher sighed and muttered about docking Rose’s pay, she let her leave early so she could take her father to the Lyons on Tottenham Court Road.
‘Enough now, Rosemary,’ he’d said sharply after they’d had a pot of tea and two scones and she’d refused all his entreaties. ‘Enough of this nonsense. You’re coming back to Durham with me. You’ll be safer there.’
Safe didn’t mean anything any more.
Rose doubted that their ghosts would follow her back to Durham so she had to stay in London and walk down the streets she’d walked with her girls. Eat in the same cafés, dance in the same clubs. Keep them close, otherwise she’d lose sight of them.
‘Daddy, you have to accept that I’m staying here,’ she said, as she’d been saying for the last hour. She didn’t belong in Durham any more than her father belonged in London with his country tweed suit and his country manners. ‘There are people here who need me.’
‘I’m not sure that Mother will let me in if I come home without you,’ he said. Then he held Rose for a count of three and kissed her forehead as he’d used to do when she was little before he hurried off to catch his train.
But London wasn’t just home to her ghosts; it was home to Rainbow Corner. Rose sleepwalked her way through each day as if she were only pretending to live. Oh, she brushed her hair and teeth, washed up and took orders, ate breakfast, lunch and dinner and all the time it was as if she were playing a part. But for three hours every night, on the dancefloor at Rainbow Corner, she could almost find her way back to the silly, careless girl she’d once been. Could feel something other than the sadness that coated her bones and encased her heart.
There was another way to feel something, though.
On the nights when Rose left Rainbow Corner and knew that she wouldn’t be able to sleep, her feet would carry her to Mayfair. To Edward’s flat.
Of course they’d seen each other often since that terrible night and the terrible day that followed. She was living in one of his houses after all and he’d been one of the silent mourners when they’d buried Maggie and Sylvia. Edward had even caught the bus back with her and Mickey Flynn after Sylvia’s wake when Rose hadn’t been able to say a word because she knew that if she opened her mouth, she’d choke on her tears.
Mickey had got off the bus at Piccadilly Circus but Edward and Rose had continued on to Kensington. They hadn’t been alone together since the afternoon in his flat and it should have been terribly awkward, but somehow it wasn’t.
Edward was far too much of a gentleman to even mention it, but despite what had happened, Rose was still comforted and calmed by his presence. In a peculiar sort of a way, she supposed that she did love him. No, not love, but she was incredibly fond of him.
‘It’s not that I don’t love you,’ she’d suddenly blurted out right there on the top deck of the number nine bus. ‘It’s just I can’t. Not any more. Everyone I love gets taken away from me so it’s probably for the best if I don’t love anyone.’
‘Rose…’ Edward had said and he didn’t sound the least bit angry with her. ‘Oh, Rose, what am I to do with you?’
‘You can be my friend,’ Rose had told him. It wasn’t the right word but it would have to do. ‘You really are the best man I know and I couldn’t bear it if we weren’t friends.’
They didn’t speak for the rest of the journey but Edward had taken Rose’s hand and she was glad of it.
But on the nights that she went to his flat in Mayfair, it wasn’t to speak, but to feel. Rose knew that it was wrong to be happy for those hours when he took her to his bed, but she couldn’t do without it. She did everything that he asked of her: to touch him, take him in her mouth, to kneel on his bedroom rug on her hands and knees so he could have her like that and she did it all, because everything he did to her felt so good.
Then afterwards, they would barely talk but held hands again as Edward walked Rose all the way back to Kensington. He’d see her to the front door, tip his hat then disappear into the shadows of the dim-out.