It Was Only Ever You (7 page)

But Sheila was determined. For as long as her savings would carry her, she followed every lead, rooted out every possibility. She kept going to the clubs looking for her star. However, as one week turned to two, and three weeks turned to four, she saw a pattern emerge. It seemed that the more she pushed her friends in the music industry, the more the musicians pulled back from her until, politely, backstage became off limits. Nothing was openly said, but it became clear to her that behind the scenes was not an area open to Sheila any more. Curtains began to be drawn, special areas were cordoned off for ‘friends’ and ‘record executives’. All her old friends were suddenly busy, running off to the next gig as soon as she walked in the door. After trailing around her favourite haunts trying to charm a break out of somebody, Sheila became not only disheartened, but puzzled.

Was she imagining it or was there something else going on?

She cornered Frankie again, this time waiting for him in the diner across the road until she saw him heading into the Cotton Club. He saw her coming and rushed towards the alley and the kitchen door, but she headed him off on the corner.

‘What is going on, Frankie?’ she said.

‘Nothing, honey,’ he said, but his voice was flat and he looked, Sheila was surprised to note, frightened.

‘Why is everybody avoiding me? Is there something flying about that I don’t know about?’

Everybody knew everybody in New York City. Manhattan was an island, the music industry was a family. When you were flying high it was like being at the best party in the world. When things were bad, it could get very small. Sheila could see in Frankie’s face that something bad was going on.

Frankie looked behind her to check if they were being seen talking together. There was only one reason people in New York looked around the streets like that. Suddenly, it hit her. Angela – Dan’s wife. Angela McAndrew – formerly Angela Balducci of the notorious Mafia clan.

Frankie shook his head. ‘I know you didn’t mean no harm by it, honey, I know you don’t like trouble. But they are bad men, Sheila – you know who I’m talking about?’

Sheila nodded. ‘I know who you’re talking about.’

Frankie put his arm on her shoulder and said, ‘Sweetheart, they are saying some bad things about you right now.’ She looked up into his old face, his eyes were kind and rheumy with sadness. His pity was so gentle, paternal almost, that it didn’t offend her. She felt like crying. Like she might collapse into his great coat and stay there for a while.

‘It’s not just the Balducci brothers neither. They got some Irish mob in their pocket, too. Guy called Joe Higgins been sniffing around asking questions. He owns a small club in Hell’s Kitchen but he’s trying to work himself up into the big time and looking for the Balduccis to back him. I hear he’s real mean, Sheila. Maybe it’s best if you left town for a while.’

Sheila nodded and smiled, but her heart was breaking. Leave the city? Was she being chased out by Dan’s bully-boy in-laws? Was it possible? But the Balducci boys were a bad bunch all right. Sheila looked at the stern, worried face of her old friend and realized with a growing sense of alarm that this was really happening.

If Angela’s brothers were going about town warning innocents like Frankie the Sax off her, no wonder she was persona non grata in the clubs.

‘Thanks, Frankie,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll do that.’

She kissed him and he said, ‘You take care now, honey,’ before tapping twice on the big steel door and being let in by the janitor. As Sheila watched him go into the kitchen she knew she was saying goodbye, not just to Frankie, but to a part of her life.

As she walked back towards midtown, Sheila let the reality of what she had just learned sink in. Aside from her dream being shattered, she had run out of money and she needed a job. Nobody would take her on as their manager right now.

There was no point in even trying. If Angela’s brothers had got to the smaller club owners, then there wasn’t a dance hall in Manhattan that would give her a job washing dishes.

She wouldn’t give up. She didn’t know anything else. But she would have to get out of the city for a while and figure out how she was going to make this work.

Sheila had made a big mistake. She knew that. Dan was the married one but the woman was the one who always paid. It wasn’t fair but she would be dumb to think it would be any different. She had screwed the wrong guy, with the wrong wife, from the wrong family and now – she was screwed. There was no sense in crying over it. She just had to move on. Where and how, she had no idea. The only one place she knew she could go at that moment was the last place she wanted to go.

Back home to her aunt and uncle in leafy Riverdale – the Bronx.

R
OSE
’
S
BEDROOM
was on the first floor and looked out on to the courtyard at the front of the house. It was just short of midday and a small breeze was tickling the tall bamboo plants that sat in huge exotic pots on the cobblestones. A gang of swallows were swooping across towards the gooseberry bushes in her mother’s walled garden.

Rose lived with her parents in a large, stone-fronted house about a mile outside Foxford, on the Ballina road. Dr John Hopkins was the general practitioner in the town and tended to the medical needs of the people of Foxford with great kindness and efficiency. He and the local priest owned the only two cars in the small town.

The courtyard was surrounded by a high stone wall covered with ivy. The stone arch led to a narrow public road down which cars rarely passed. From her window Rose could see the small wooden gate, which led to a hilly field, circled by shrubs and trees. It was part of their garden, but semi-wild. A man came to mow it throughout the summer, but otherwise her mother had her hands full with the rose garden and the walled fruit garden and rarely ventured across the road to ‘the hill’.

Rose was sitting by the window, painting, with her easel propped up on the wide, deep sill. The weather had cooled in the last few days and there were droplets of condensation on the inside of the glass. Rose was trying to capture the drops of fluid, with their sparkle and shadows, in a charcoal drawing. She looked across to the field and, from behind a bank of hydrangea to the left of the hill, she saw Patrick’s hand waving a blue shirt.

Excited, she grabbed her cardigan from the bed, and ran downstairs. ‘I’m going out, Mother,’ she called into the kitchen.

‘Where are you going?’ Eleanor called out anxiously.

‘Just taking a walk across the fields to do some sketching. I’ll be back within the hour.’

Rose was always careful never to stay out longer than she promised in case her mother became suspicious and followed her. They would keep her boarding with the nuns in Crossmolina till she had finished her Matriculation exams at nineteen, then they would decide what was for the best. But Eleanor wondered sometimes if it was right to keep her daughter so cosseted. Rose saw nobody these days and only went out for the walks she took across the fields with her chalks and pencils. She made rough sketches which she would later turn into beautiful watercolours at home.

What Eleanor did not realize was that Rose’s notepad was already filled with detailed drawings of flowers ready to show her mother when she got in after a deliciously clandestine hour with Patrick Murphy. Now, Rose sauntered casually from the house, crossed the road and, as soon as she was out of sight, ran over the hill to the bushes at the back of the hill where Patrick was waiting. She was so happy to see him that she simply tumbled into the arms and began kissing him.

‘Did you miss me?’ she said. The line of her white neck was taut, her face bent back, lips parted, her blonde curls tumbling down her back, eyes sparkling with unashamed joy. Every time he laid eyes on her Patrick was shocked anew by her beauty. More than that, she seemed to understand him. Rose’s passion for drawing was as strong as his own love for singing.

‘I missed you madly every minute of every hour and well you know it!’ he said, laughing.

‘I felt like I was going to go mad these last two days – I was furious when my mother told me we were going to Galway for the day. You do realize it has been nearly a full forty-eight hours since I last saw you? I was afraid you would have forgotten all about me.’

‘Never! What was your name again?’

Rose punched his arm, reached up and kissed him briefly on the lips then all over his face, pulling him down with unexpected strength on to the ground until the two of them were laughing and rolling around on the warm, soft grass.

Patrick touched her tenderly, tentatively – running his long, browned hands over the bare skin of her neck and her arms, then, finally, slipping back the strap of her cotton sundress, the creamy curve of her shoulder. After the christening touch, he gently kissed each place in turn before kissing her mouth, reaching into her with a hunger that made her whole body ache. She felt passion race through her in a wave – as if she was drowning again and he was the only one who could save her. Rose knotted his fingers with hers then reached their intertwined hands and arms out to their sides. The push and pull of pushing their hands away from their bodies was a dance of discretion; a way of holding each other while stopping themselves from taking the next step. Their young, vital bodies hurt with a yearning but they both knew they could not go too far. While Rose, at only eighteen, was recklessly in love, she knew it was her responsibility, as the girl, to hold herself back from luring her lover into trouble. They were in enough trouble already just seeing each other.

Rose knew that she would never experience a love this strong, this certain ever again. This was the love Hollywood films were made on. The instant passionate knowing you have, one for the other. Rose would do anything she could to protect it.

In the last few weeks she had even withdrawn from her dearest friend, Patrick’s sister Sinead, because she was afraid that she would have to confide in her and Sinead might confide in her own parents. The easy-going Murphy family would probably be delighted to see their son happily in love with their daughter’s friend, but Rose’s parents would be a different matter altogether. Deep in her heart, Rose knew they would not approve. To supplement their small farm, Patrick’s father worked in the local woollen mills, and his wife and six children lived in a two-bedroom smallholding with three cows and a handful of sheep and two small fields just outside the town. They were respectable, but they drove a horse and cart and did not own a car. They were not the sort of people the Hopkinses would invite to take tea in their drawing room and they would certainly not allow one of them to marry their precious only daughter.

Rose pushed Patrick back then shook her head quickly from side to side to break the spell. She sat up and straightened her hair then leaned back against the bark of the narrow tree and took out her pad.

Patrick ran his hand in frustration through his thick hair, puffed out a deep breath and let out a short, angry sigh. He lay on the grass in front of her and Rose felt the gaze of his blue eyes on her as she reached into her pocket for a pencil.

‘Stop looking at me,’ she said. ‘I’m the one with the pencil. I’m the one looking at you.’

‘You’re so beautiful – I could look at you for ever,’ he said, and meant it.

‘Well don’t,’ she said smiling. She felt thrilled when he told her she was beautiful. ‘Look over there at that tree while I draw your profile.’

Reluctantly, he turned his face, his eyes rolling back towards her.

‘Stop,’ she said. ‘I’m serious, I want a drawing of you.’

In the shadow of the tree, his face relaxed, his deep tan revealing white crow’s feet around his eyes. His nose was strong and his browline high, his eyes glinted shards of blue and grey. In that moment Rose could see and feel that Patrick was not simply a young man, but nature itself. He was the earth beneath them and the sky above. As complex and beautiful as a tree or a flower – as significant as a single blade of grass in an endless, lush, green field. While she sketched the lines of his face she tried to capture not simply a likeness of his good looks, but the essence of who he was. Deep, sensitive, artistic. Other girls saw the handsome, dark-haired bad-boy. None of them could know what lay underneath. None of them could know what she knew about him. None of them could feel his spirit the way she could. Rose wanted to define his spirit in a drawing so that she could show him how much she not only loved him but could see him for who he was. If Patrick saw himself how she saw him, if he knew how well she knew what lay inside him – he would love her for ever. He would never look at another girl. She would be the only one.

*

Under the dappled sunlight she looked so perfect Patrick could not believe he had found a sweetheart as delicate and beautiful as this girl was. The wind touching the leaves sent dappled flecks of light across her pale skin and the blonde curls tumbled over her shoulders. Patrick watched Rose as her eyes flicked across and then down at the page. Something about the way she was so absorbed in her work, the confident skill and the way her small hand moved across the paper, brought such a stab of love in his heart that he said what he was thinking out loud.

‘I love you.’

As the words came out of his mouth he wondered if he should be saying them. Although he could feel that he loved her in his heart, it was the first time he had ever said it to her. Indeed, at twenty-five, it was the first time he had said it to any girl – and he had been with plenty. It was always worth thinking carefully before you gave a girl ideas. Otherwise she might think you wanted to marry her.

Patrick reassured himself that he was only telling the truth. He had meant the words fully when he said them and, oh, but she was beautiful, so beautiful.

He sat up and reached across, gently taking the pencil from her hands. Then he gave a broad smile, before taking her face in his hands and kissing her softly on the lips.

‘I love you too,’ she said.

Patrick was visibly relieved. It was out now – she loved him back. They loved each other. She was the girl for him – it was settled. They could date now, and all the others would leave him alone. He could take her to the pictures in Ballina and show her off to his friends and family.