Read Online After the Last Dance by Manning Sarra - Free Book Online

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.’
    â€˜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’.
    â€˜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 —
    â€˜I say, could I