After the Last Dance by Manning Sarra

name of the cinema she and Shirley had gone to every afternoon of the two weeks each summer when they were shipped off to their Aunt Patricia in Aberdeen. Aunt Patricia was a staunch believer in little girls being neither seen nor heard so she’d always given them a shilling apiece each morning and told them not to come back until dinner time.
    Rose Beaumont. It was everything a name should be. Sophisticated, elegant, exotic. Someone called Rose Beaumont would have adventures and get invited to dinner by rakish men. Those sorts of things simply didn’t happen to girls called Rosemary Winthrop.
    Rose also acquired a new address a week later when, with the help of Sylvia and Phyllis, she executed a sneaky daylight flit. Phyllis kept Mrs Cannon talking with tales of playing with the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, when she was a girl, as Sylvia and Rose tripped down the stairs with Rose’s suitcase and with Rose owing a week’s rent.
    â€˜With what she was charging you and that business with your ration book… well, she’s lucky we don’t report her to the police,’ Sylvia said as they walked the length of Oxford Street to Rose’s new digs: the two-bedroom flat in Holborn on a tiny street near the British Museum that Sylvia shared with Phyllis and Maggie. ‘You’ll have to bunk down with me but as long as you don’t fidget or snore we should be all right,’ Sylvia told her and the rent was only fourteen shillings a week each and there was no landlady living on the premises to take away her ration book and complain about the noise she made going up and down the stairs.
    There’d been another girl, Irene, but she’d completed her nurse training and was working in a hospital in Birmingham. ‘Also she was tiny, barely came up to my shoulder,’ Maggie said later that night as they toasted Rose’s arrival with a Scotch egg cut into quarters and a bottle of peach wine. ‘So we couldn’t wear her clothes.’
    All of Rose’s clothes – and what a pitiful collection they were apart from Shirley’s black crêpe de Chine dress and her mother’s funeral fur – were put in the communal wardrobe, though Sylvia said there was no point in hanging up the pale blue taffeta as none of them would ever want to wear it.
    Sylvia, Maggie and Phyllis were so welcoming that first night but they’d still been appalled when Rose had confessed after too much peach wine that she hadn’t written to her parents since she’d run away. They hadn’t been too shocked about the running away but as Sylvia said, ‘Have a heart, Rosie. They must be imagining all sorts of terrible things – that you’ve been killed by a bomb or kidnapped by white slave traders.’
    The next evening, Phyllis sat Rose down as soon as they’d both come home from work – Rose at the café, Phyllis at the Admiralty offices in Whitehall – and under her gentle but firm auspices, Rose wrote home.
    â€˜It’s best to stick to the facts,’ Phyllis said. Then she smiled mischievously. ‘Though the facts are always open to interpretation.’
    First, Rose apologised profusely for the spiteful words in that other letter she’d propped up against the clock on the mantelpiece, then turned to more pressing matters.
    Please don’t worry about me. I have found a job at a small business run by a kindly older couple
, she wrote.
In the evenings, I volunteer for the Red Cross and I’m sharing a lovely flat near the British Museum with three girls from good families
.
    There were also quite a few paragraphs about learning from her mistakes and how doing her bit for the war had made Rose see the errors of her selfish, impetuous ways. Phyllis was very good at helping to write letters. She often set up shop in the Reading Room at Rainbow Corner and helped GIs write to girlfriends and fiancées who had to be let down gently