It took a long time to get out of London. Leo hadn’t had to negotiate the snarly rush hour in years and Jane couldn’t fathom out the SatNav so kept stabbing at random buttons until Leo snapped at her to stop. Then she snapped at Leo for snapping at her.
When they finally made it onto the motorway, they were immediately stuck in traffic. Jane sighed then twisted round to look out of the back window as if she expected to see Lydia in a car behind frantically signalling them to turn round.
Leo wished that he still smoked. And he wished for the hundredth time that he’d stayed down and out in Las Vegas. He might have hated himself when he got the call to say that Rose had gone, but at least he wouldn’t have had to listen when she…
‘Leo, Rose didn’t mean what she said.’ Jane’s hand covered his where it rested on the gear stick. ‘She’s in a lot of pain and she’s all muddled up with the drugs.’
He took a steadying breath. ‘I shouldn’t have come back.’
Jane tightened her grip on his hand, even as he indicated, then changed lanes. ‘Yes, you should have. There’s no question about it.’
‘I don’t see that I’ve been much use.’ He hated when he got like this, elbow-deep inside himself. Usually the only way out was to get lost. ‘I don’t get absolved of my sins just because I’ve spent a few weeks plastering and painting old houses.’
‘You’ve done a lot more than that,’ Jane said. ‘You’ve listened to her stories and you’ve made her laugh. She’s been able to rely on you, lean on you.’ She tightened her fingers again. ‘Leo, you must realise that Rose adores you. She doesn’t do a very good job of hiding it.’
Leo looked over at Jane. Her hair was loose and hanging in sodden rats’ tails. She must have been out in the rain for hours. She looked anxious, especially when they talked about Rose, but she seemed softer too. She was still beautiful, but he’d got used to that. ‘While we’re on the subject, Rose likes you too.’
‘Well… maybe.’ Jane plucked at her seatbelt. ‘Mostly I’ve stayed for Lydia’s cooking. I’m surprised I can still do this up.’
‘Stop fishing. You know you’re hot, even with a few extra kilos,’ Leo told her, because she was and his mood lightened as she hissed and took her hand off his so she could punch him lightly on the arm.
‘Not kilos. Maybe a couple of pounds. Is a pound more than a kilo? I can never remember.’ She was able to pull a face now. ‘Two pounds to a kilo, right?’
‘Yeah, give or take.’ The atmosphere had shifted along with the traffic, which was now moving slowly but steadily. Leo missed the feel of Jane’s hand resting on his.
‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do when this is all over?’ she asked. ‘Will you go back to the States?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, because it was something that he tried not to think about. When this was all over it meant that Rose would be gone. Besides, in a strange sort of way, he was enjoying this limbo. He’d left his bad habits behind and, so far, he’d managed not acquire any new ones. ‘I’ve never been big on forward planning. What about you? Do you think that there’s even an outside chance that you might get back with Mr Ex?’
Jane shook her head just the once. ‘Oh God, no. That ship has well and truly sailed.’ Leo thought that he might have veered into dangerous territory, but then she smiled. ‘You know, I wish I had gone back to him sometimes. It would have been simpler. Less confusing.’
‘You didn’t love him? Not really, did you?’
Jane glanced over at him, her expression ancient and unfathomable. ‘No, of course I didn’t.’ She suddenly grinned, all teeth and gums. ‘God, being stuck in this car is like being trapped in a Confessional.’
Leo wanted to ask Jane if she’d ever been in love, but deep down he already knew the answer. So many things he wanted to ask her, to tell her, but it was best to stay silent. They’d cleared the motorway now, driving along unlit country lanes and though Leo had thought they’d be hopelessly lost, he realised that he knew the way. He’d always know the way to Lullington Bay.
He saw the narrow turning just in time and swung right. All he had to do was say ‘Lullington Bay’ in his head and in the time it took there was another turning, the trees parted and he could see the shadowy outline of the house.
‘So, talking of love lost and all that, who did Rose end up with after the war?’ Jane said. ‘Was it Danny, who I have to say sounds like a wrong ’un, or…’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Leo promised. The rumble of the tyres on the gravel drive sounded like coming home. He remembered falling off his bike after attempting a wheelie and landing facedown on the same gravel and Rose and his mother picking tiny pieces of it from his skin with tweezers, promising him an ice cream if he managed not to cry. ‘This is Lullington Bay.’
He wished that they were here on a summer’s day when the sun shone down on the sandstone and glinted off the gabled roof. The house stood high on the cliffs, which undulated gently down to sand dunes they’d raced across to get to the beach. It had always felt as if the sea was taunting them as they made the trek from the house laden with towels, picnic baskets, buckets and spades, his mother yelling at Leo to slow down before he broke his neck.
They got out of the car and crunched towards the front door. ‘I thought it was a cottage.’ Jane sounded a little put out. ‘I didn’t think it would be this big.’
‘It was the old manor house but it burned down in the nineteen-hundreds so they rebuilt it in the Arts and Crafts style,’ Leo told her. ‘Caused a hell of a row at the time. Come on, we’ll go round the back.’
There were light sensors that snapped on every few metres and the familiar shapes of the garden came into view. The rose bushes, a new one planted each year; the vegetable patch; the herb garden by the back door, covered in netting to protect it from the neighbourhood cats; and the patio with the wrought iron table and chairs where they used to eat their meals when they weren’t on the beach.
‘We spent every summer here.’ It didn’t even matter whether Jane was listening, he just wanted to say the words out loud, make the hazy memories a little brighter, a little more defined. ‘It’s such a sad cliché, isn’t it? To say that the summers were longer when we were kids but it felt that way. Our aunts, uncles and all our cousins would come down too so there was always a huge gang of us. Sometimes we’d walk along the shoreline until we came to a little kiosk that sold ice cream with real honeycomb studded through it and we’d round up the kids from the village to come back to our beach so we could play hide and seek in the dunes. I used to live for the summer holidays.’
‘My summer holidays weren’t really like that,’ Jane offered, though she didn’t say what her summer holidays had been like. ‘Sounds nice, though.’
‘Yeah, like something out of Enid Blyton,’ Leo said with a sneer to counteract the dreamy tone that had crept into his voice.
‘Never really had much time for Enid Blyton either,’ Jane said and Leo found it impossible to imagine what she’d been like as a child. ‘So, did you ever learn how to jimmy a window during your endless summers here or have you got a key?’
There was no full-time staff at the house, but lodgers; Victoria and Katy, who taught English at the University of Sussex. The house was in darkness so they were obviously out playing bridge or attending a reading of Virginia Woolf’s Selected Works in nearby Alfriston or whatever it was that English professors of a certain age did at gone eight on a Friday night.
There was always a key hidden in the little wooden house on top of the bird table and the alarm code was his grandparents’ old telephone number but it still felt like they were intruding as Leo turned on lights and led Jane through the kitchen and down the hall. The parquet floor and the panelled walls gleamed dully and Leo could still smell beeswax and the faintest lingering trace of the perfume Rose wore, though Lydia said that Rose had hardly come down at all this past summer.
‘It has that lived-in feeling, not at all like the place in Kensington,’ Jane said, running her hand along the carved banister as they walked up the stairs. ‘This, this… feels like home.’
‘Rose used to spend most of her time down here. Ages ago. Before I was born.’
‘Oh? Why did she move back to London?’ Jane asked and the answer wasn’t a happy one but before he could tell her, he felt his phone vibrate.
It was Lydia. As stoic and as calm as she’d been when he was going to pieces in front of her, over the phone now her voice was stilted like she was holding back tears. Dr Howard had been over and was adamant that Rose should be on a morphine pump and Rose hadn’t even argued. ‘I’m expecting him back any moment now. He was quite shocked at how much she’d deteriorated from when he saw her this morning. Anyway, how are you getting on? Have you found everything? What do you mean, you’ve only just got there? Let me speak to Jane.’
While Jane spoke to Lydia, he guided her up the stairs towards Rose’s room where you could look out of the windows at the big blue outside where sky met sea. When he was little, he’d lie here with Rose in the early evening when it was still too light outside to sleep and she’d read to him. And when he still refused to go to sleep, they’d stare out at the horizon with her big binoculars to see if they could spot any pirate ships.
She wasn’t even dead yet but he could already feel her ghost in this house.
‘I’ll just see if it’s in there.’ He was standing idle in the middle of the room as Jane, still on the phone, walked over to the big walnut wardrobe and unlocked the door. Another intrusion. She clamped the phone between shoulder and ear as she began to move the hangers to one side, stopping to unzip garment bags. Then she stiffened and Leo felt the answering shiver trip down his spine. ‘I’ve found it. I’ll get the trunk and we’ll head back.’
Leo could see Jane’s shoulders shake; she raised a hand to touch her face. Then she took down the garment bag and when she turned round her face was bright, blank.
‘There’s a trunk under the bed. Cream with black leather straps, Rose’s initials stamped on it,’ she told him and Leo obediently dropped to his knees, peered under the bed and hauled it out.
‘What’s in the bag?’ he asked.
‘A dress.’ Jane stared at her feet. Her shoulders shook again. ‘A limp, pale blue taffeta dress.’
Her voice cracked a little and she stood with head bowed for a few moments until she could raise her head and give Leo another one of those glittering, empty smiles that promised everything and delivered absolutely nothing.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Are you all right?’
‘No, not really.’
Jane nodded. ‘Lydia says everything else is in the trunk. We don’t need to open it. Let’s just go.’
It was a small trunk but it needed both of them to push and tug it carefully down the stairs. It had seemed small but it was too big to get in the boot of Lydia’s little car and in the end they managed to get it on the back seat, but only by pushing the front seats so far forward that they had to drive back to London with their knees almost touching their chins.
When they got back to Kensington, Rose was still asleep. Agnieska was sitting by her bed and knitting. ‘I’m staying the night. Miss Beaumont is fine. Didn’t even wake when I took her blood pressure.’ She nodded approvingly. ‘The sleep will do her good.’
‘It’s not like a good night’s sleep is going to suddenly cure her cancer,’ Leo grumbled as they reached their rooms. ‘Maybe I should sit up with her.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ Jane said because he looked ashen with exhaustion. ‘Not tonight. Who knows what tomorrow might bring?’
Leo traced a pattern on the floor with his toe. ‘We should try and get some sleep, then.’
He just stood there, not moving, until Jane pulled him into the room and shut the door. All of Leo’s newfound assurance had vanished and he looked… untethered. It really had been such a horrible day. ‘I’m not even a little bit tired.’ she said. ‘Would you mind if we stayed up and chatted for a little bit… if you want to, that is?’
‘You mean, what the young people call hanging out?’ Leo sat down on the bed and toed off his sneakers. ‘Sometimes I think you learned to speak in the early nineteen-hundreds.’
He was scowling again, which was hardly surprising.
‘Shall I tell you a secret? It’s guaranteed to cheer you up.’ Jane didn’t mean that kind of secret but Leo obviously thought she did because he nodded, his sudden smile a millimetre away from a leer.
‘Yeah, go on then. Give it your best shot.’
Jane struck a pose; hand on hip, leg bent. ‘In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.’
Leo looked at her as if she was talking in tongues. ‘What?’
‘The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,’ she elaborated and when Leo shook his head and gave her a tiny, amused, almost pitying smile like he thought she’d completely lost the plot, she threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘Audrey Hepburn, darling! My Fair Lady , which I must have seen at least fifty times,’ Jane went into the bathroom. ‘That’s how I learned to speak proper.’
‘Really? How did you speak before then?’
‘Improperly. Mostly through a series of grunts and hand gestures.’
Leo laughed, even though not a word of it was a lie. ‘I bet your first words were a beautifully constructed sentence in perfect RP.’
Jane was already taking off her make-up but she made sure to meet his gaze as he leaned against the doorjamb so she could arch an eyebrow at him. She hadn’t been able to do that in a long, long time. She was too scared to subject the delicate skin around her mouth and eyes to anyone but the man she saw in New York who did her fillers and injectables. Maybe, as the feeling returned to her face, it would make her feel other things that she’d hidden away for so long that she thought they were truly dead and buried. ‘Hardly, darling.’ She managed to sound as artless and artful as ever.
‘Haven’t we moved past that whole “darling” crap?’ Leo edged into the bathroom, closed the lid on the loo and sat down. ‘You called me Leo in the car. Don’t even try to deny it.’
‘So I did.’ Jane concentrated on easing off every last scrap of make-up. Maybe it was the hours spent listening to Rose tell her stories, take stock of her life, pulling and picking at the threads, tracing them back to that first stitch. Or seeing Charles again, which had upset her, unsettled her, made her remember too much, but Jane wanted to tell someone her stories too. But there would be consequences…
‘Leo,’ she said deliberately, lingering over the two syllables. ‘Tell me more about the summers at Lullington Bay.’
‘What shall I tell you?’ he asked.
‘Everything,’ Jane said.
So Leo told her about being allowed to stay up late and lighting bonfires on the beach and toasting marshmallows while Rose told them stories about America. Of drive-ins and cowboys and driving out to the desert to watch rockets fly into space and a hundred other things that she knew would enthral two little boys.
While Jane’s face was soaking in cream from a pot of magical ingredients that cost over a hundred pounds, they sat cross-legged on the bed and he told her how he’d lie on the floor of the sitting room at Lullington Bay with Rose’s art books spread out before him and copy the pictures while Rose looked on approvingly. That she hadn’t been quite so approving when he got older and would get drunk on cider with the lads from the village and then slope off with one of their sisters to the little lane behind the pub.
‘She didn’t say much but you know what Rose is like. She can say plenty with just one look,’ Leo said and he pursed his lips, flared his nostrils and narrowed his eyes but still didn’t come close to approximating Rose’s disapproval. ‘She’d leave condoms under my pillow. They had to be from Rose. No way were they from my mum.’
‘No, I can’t imagine your mother going into a chemist to ask for a packet of Durex’s finest,’ Jane said. The thought of Linda, handbag clutched tightly in front of her, looking furtively about to make sure that none of the Rotary Club wives had spotted her, made Jane giggle and then she noticed that Leo wasn’t laughing along. ‘Oh, darling… Leo, don’t. Please don’t.’
He was crying. Jane hated seeing people cry. Depending on the person, she could be sympathetic, stroking their hair and cooing platitudes, but now when she reached out a hand to gently touch Leo’s shorn head, it was different. Leo was different. Oh God, she was different. How had that happened?
‘You have all these happy memories of Rose,’ she told him softly. ‘That’s a lot more than some people have.’
He didn’t say anything but covered his face with his hands as he must have done when he was a little boy who liked to look for pirate ships and stay up late to toast marshmallows.
It was pure instinct to raise herself up on her knees and shuffle closer so she could put her arms around him, kiss the top of his bent head. ‘Please don’t cry, Leo. You’ll start me off too.’
He mumbled something but it was unintelligible through the sobs he was failing to hold back.
‘Come on. You have to stay strong for a little longer,’ she said and he took a couple of deep breaths and when he raised his head, Jane wished he hadn’t because he didn’t even bother to try to hide his vulnerability.
‘I’m going to miss her,’ he whispered. ‘I wish I’d become someone she could be proud of instead of wasting all these years fucking about. She had all this faith in me and I blew it.’
‘That doesn’t matter. You’ve shown Rose who you could be and now you owe it to her to become that person.’
Jane was still holding him, foreheads almost touching. It felt very intimate, comforting someone. Not entirely unpleasant either.
‘It’s not that easy to become someone else, though, is it?’ Leo said quietly.
Jane couldn’t help but smile. ‘Oh, it’s much easier than you think,’ she said. At that moment she was simply desperate to tell him her story, almost as much as she wanted to wipe the haunted look off his face.
It was easier, safer, to close the tiny gap that separated them and kiss him.
She kissed the next sob right out of his mouth and she kept on kissing him until Leo got the message that it was all right to kiss her back. He still looked like he might cry but that was only because Jane pulled back from him and peeled off her jumper and unclipped her bra. She was used to men looking like they might cry when she took her clothes off.
Leo stared at her face fixedly as if it was a superhuman effort of will not to stare at her breasts instead. ‘Why? Why now? I mean, Vegas doesn’t count, we were both hammered.’
Jane shrugged and his eyes did drift down to her breasts then. She’d have been insulted if they hadn’t. ‘Because I want to and because I think we both need to get out of our heads in a way that doesn’t involve artificial stimulants.’
‘I can’t even tell if you’re playing me any more,’ Leo muttered, even though Jane wasn’t. At least she didn’t think she was, but before she could contradict him he held up his hands. ‘Just so we’re clear, I’m allowed to touch, aren’t I? You’re not going to smack me again?’
‘Only if that’s what turns you on, darling,’ she drawled and this might just have been about trying to put him out of his misery but the way Leo kept looking at her with hooded eyes, his tongue caught between his teeth, made Jane wonder if she was really doing this out of the goodness of her heart. ‘Come here and kiss me.’
Leo’s kisses tasted of all the sweet things Jane had ever known: champagne and red velvet cake and pink spun sugar from the fair. She did smack him when he shaped her breasts and whispered, ‘I thought you said we weren’t going to do anything that involved any artificial stimulants,’ because they were all her. No implants. Just the fat sucked out of her arse to plump up what had barely been there. She was still mostly bones and edges and hard lines, but it seemed as if her flesh spilled voluptuously into Leo’s reverent hands. He said he’d never felt anything so soft as her breasts and thighs and the tiny bulge of her belly as he rubbed his cheek against it.
Jane couldn’t help but laugh even though sex was never a laughing matter. ‘You’re tickling me,’ she whispered.
‘Sorry,’ he whispered back, although only the moon glinting through the window was witness to the two of them sprawled on the bed.
‘It’s all right, it’s a good kind of tickling,’ she said and Leo, even as he had his hands full of her, gave her a suspicious, fearful look as if could actually hear the cogs whirring in her brain.
‘Oh no,’ he murmured fiercely. ‘Don’t even think it, Jane.’
‘But now I’ve thought it, I can’t unthink it,’ she reasoned. ‘Are you ticklish? I bet you are.’
Leo tried to hold her back with kisses but her hands were already skimming down his back, tugging his T-shirt out of the way to trace figures of eight with the tips of her fingers.
He squirmed away from her, but Jane let her touch dance against his rib cage and then under his arms. Leo was helpless as a baby as she sought out his secrets. Jane watched incredulously as he giggled and moaned and begged her to stop when she ran her fingertips along the soft skin of his forearms.
‘I think you needed to laugh even more than you needed to get laid,’ she said as he batted her hands away and lay back panting. It was true. He was always joking, always smiling, but he never really laughed.
‘There’s not been much to laugh about lately. And actually, now you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh. Not properly.’
Then it was Leo who comforted her, although Jane wasn’t crying but wearing the same neutral expression that seemed to take an awful lot of effort these days. But still, Leo drew her closer so he could kiss the shadows away from her face.
Maybe sentimentality was contagious but it seemed to Jane that Leo healed every inch of her that he touched, his mouth a warm, wet, insistent thing as he travelled down her body. She wasn’t so damaged or broken that she had to fake it (not all the time) and Leo was good at this. Really good, she thought, her eyes rolling back in her head, as he draped her legs over his shoulders and feasted on her.
It was no wonder all those women, all those other men’s wives, had been so hot for him when he was so clever with his hands and his mouth, so generous with his attentions, so pleased that Jane was pleased with him that he let her go once and then twice, though strictly speaking it was his turn now. She twisted under him as he fucked her with his fingers and at the same time his tongue kept stroking over her again and again and again.
‘No. Stop. Stop,’ she said when she could speak again and it didn’t take much effort to coax him up the bed because he was so hard and needy for her. He sighed in relief when she grasped his cock in her hands and began to rub it gently.
‘You’re so pretty, Leo,’ she purred, her cheek brushing against his prick. ‘Is this all for me?’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ he said, reaching out for her, but Jane pulled away and stuck her tongue out at him.
‘I want to do this,’ Jane insisted. ‘You just lie back and think of England.’
In the end, he gave up, and let her do God’s work. Jane had certain smarts in this department too, had always got rave reviews, and she wasn’t surprised that the things she did, both of them naked now, made him buck his hips and beg her to fuck him.
She’d barely got started, had only just lowered herself onto him, when he came undone. Coming and crying under her and she didn’t despise him for being weak. This time, Jane understood. She stayed where she was, her flesh fluttering all around him as she licked his tears away.
‘Come on, Leo, this was meant to make you happy,’ she sighed. ‘Why are you so scared to get happy?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. Then he looked up at her. His face was still damp but he smiled. It was a shaky, watery smile but it was exactly what Jane wanted to see. ‘I don’t usually come that quickly. Honestly. You can call some of my exes and they’ll tell you I could go all night. Then they’ll tell you that I’m insatiable.’
‘Darling, I’d already figured that out all by myself,’ Jane said. Leo did laugh then and he was still half hard inside her, and got even harder when she dragged his hands up to her breasts.
‘Seriously though, are these real? They feel real.’
‘Oh!’ She gasped as he worked one nipple between thumb and forefinger, pulled the other one into the wet heat of his mouth so she could hardly think. ‘I’m not sure that any of me is real,’ Jane said, though she hadn’t meant to.
‘This… right now, this is real,’ Leo said and he sat up, his chest, skin so warm, flush to hers so he could kiss her again.
It was the first time Jane had told a man exactly what she liked, instead of pretending that everything they did was fine with her. Leo was very biddable. He gripped her wrists, held them tight behind her back because she needed that tiny hint of pain, as his mouth worked her breasts again, licking, tugging, sucking and eventually, to reward his efforts, Jane rose above him and slowly, inch by inch, took him inside her again. She wondered if Leo felt as if he was plunging underwater into oceans warmed by the sun too.
Then he seemed to instinctively know that a hint wasn’t going to be enough and he flipped them so he was on top, Jane underneath and he rode her like that. His hips snapping against hers, her legs wrapped tight around him and she was almost there, needed one more deep thrust, one more filthy word whispered in her ear. She was straining towards something just out of reach, just beyond her grasp.
‘It’s all right,’ Leo said. ‘I’ve got you,’ and he pushed her over the edge.