Read It Was Only Ever You Online
Authors: Kate Kerrigan
It Was Only Ever You
About
It Was Only Ever You
This is the story of three women and one charismatic man.
It is 1950s New York, the time of dance halls, swing bands and the beginning of rock and roll. In The Emerald, Ava Brogan dances the night away, knowing that she will never be pretty like the other Irish girls there, wishing her mother wouldn’t keep plotting to find her a husband.
Here, too, Sheila Klein, a Holocaust orphan, dreams of finding a star and making her name in the music industry. Tough and cynical, she has never let her heart be broken by any man.
Enter Patrick Murphy, with a sublime voice, a hit song in his back pocket and charisma to burn. Ava and Sheila’s worlds are about to be turned upside down. They do not know that Patrick’s first great love from Ireland is on her way to New York – determined to find and get her man at all costs. Beautiful Rose is used to getting what she wants in life and that’s not about to change any time soon.
For Rosie
because we’re rocking and rolling now.
Historical Note from the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Riverdale, New York, March 1941
S
AMUEL
KLEIN
clicked off the radio and leaned back into his low, soft chair. He sucked deeply on his pipe, releasing a ball of smoke into the still air, then said through clenched teeth, ‘You’ve got to love the British – but they could be right, you know? Churchill reckons that now the Yanks have agreed to come on board we are finally coming to the end of this wretched war.’
His wife Anya shot him a warning look but it was too late. Their niece Sheila was at the door and had already heard him. Samuel did not like to be shushed by his wife, especially not in his own home, but he immediately realized his terrible mistake. He laid his pipe down in the large wooden ashtray on his armrest and leaned forward in his chair.
‘The war is ending?’ said Sheila.
Samuel and Anya loved their fourteen-year-old niece as if she was their own child. Samuel’s brother had been a German opera singer, living in Berlin when Hitler came to power. Klaus had intended to move his whole family to America, and had sent his young daughter over to New York for an extended ‘holiday’. He had kept his son behind so he could finish his studies at the Mendelssohn Conservatory of Music. Then war broke out and it was too late.
Sheila had learned not to think about what was happening to her mother and father and brother. She had been so impatient to see them again that the waiting for them to come had been almost unbearable.
‘Soon,’ was all they had ever said. ‘After the war.’ After a while, she could see that her continued enquiries hurt Auntie Anya and Uncle Samuel, so she made herself stop. When her family’s faces came into her mind’s eye she put thoughts of them to one side, reassuring herself that she would see them again when the war was over. Until then it was best to do what Auntie and Uncle told her to do, and live in the day.
But now, the war was ending! Everything would change. They would be coming home? Five years had been a long time, but now it was over!
Samuel watched Sheila as she stood in the doorway, her arms crossed and her bony shoulders in their long, brown cardigan hunched. She had a strong face, like her father. A long aquiline nose gave way to a broad, generous mouth – alight when smiling, markedly downturned when not. Her eyes were dark brown with luxurious lashes, but their heavy lids gave her the appearance of being slightly bored. Sheila’s habitually serious expression made her look older and wiser than her years. An unfortunate fact, in Samuel’s opinion, that was in direct contradiction to her sweet, open nature.
Sheila’s face was now lit up with such an expression of hopeful delight that it seemed to Samuel as if she held the world in her eyes. If they could only see her, Churchill and Roosevelt; if they could only see the expression of pure innocence and hope on this child’s face they would put an immediate end to this war and find a way of bringing her family back to her.
‘Come in, bubula... sit down.’
Sheila looked at her uncle and there was something in his face that made her not want to do as he said. Why was he not smiling too? He had said it himself – the war was ending and yet...
She stayed where she was and said, ‘When the war ends, then Mama and Papa and Hans...’
The words trailed off.
Why could she not finish the sentence? Anya and Samuel said nothing. Anya’s face was as pale as dough.
The terrible silence hung in the air between them in unspoken words, in assurances.
‘Mama and Papa and Hans will be here. Soon. After the war.’
The war was nearly over. So surely it was safe to say it now.
But they weren’t saying it, or telling her that everything would be all right. Why weren’t they saying it? Why did she feel unable to say it out loud herself?
‘Sit down, bubula,’ Samuel said. ‘I have something to tell you.’
Sheila looked at her uncle’s face with its grey, pointed beard. Her own father wore his beard short and brown. She knew that from the photograph, although she could not picture it from memory now. She could not recall the feel of it pressed against her cheek. Uncle Samuel’s eyes were sparkling with tears. Not tears of happiness, like when he listened to Mahler on the gramophone. This was something else. Something she did not recognize and yet she knew what it was. She couldn’t look at him, didn’t want to look at him. She looked to her auntie for comfort, for a shred of hope, but Anya’s face was equally stricken. Sheila felt sick. She steadied herself in the doorway and looked around the room, searching for something to alleviate that awful fear crawling its way into her conscious mind.
This small drawing room was her home. For five years it had been her sanctuary, the safe place where she had come to find salve for the torn skin on her knee from Auntie’s medicine box, or to tinker on Samuel’s piano. But in that moment it felt as if the room itself was shrinking away from her; the polished mahogany sideboard clung to the flowery wallpaper, the large radio with its constantly flickering light was silenced in shame, the piano lid shut tight as if the keys beneath it were paralysed with dread.
They were dead. Her family was dead. Hitler had killed them. That was why they hadn’t written. That was why nobody ever talked about them or the war ending any more. Even as she thought it, Sheila kept telling herself that it could not be true. She was a bad, bad person for even imagining such a thing. You shouldn’t tell yourself people were dead unless...
‘Bubula,’ Samuel said. ‘Come, sit down. We must talk...’
He reached out to her, his long fingers outstretched. Tears were streaming down his face and in a sudden moment, as suddenly as if she had been slapped, Sheila recognized the look in his eyes. Pity. They were not the tears of emotion inspired by music or art that she so often saw in her uncle’s eyes. They were tears that told her her parents really were dead. Not only that, they told her that she was not loved, only pitied.
Anger flashed through Sheila as she ran from the room. She heard Samuel say to her auntie, ‘Leave her, Anya. Give her some time.’
Sheila ran to her room and locked the door. Her heart was pounding. She felt sick. Where were the tears? She waited patiently for a few minutes but they didn’t come. Why wouldn’t they come? She wanted to shout out and scream, ‘It’s not fair! None of this is fair!’ but she could not. If she let any of the words out she was afraid they would be too loud, and the whole world would hear her.
Sheila felt a sob building in her chest. Not the kind of sob that comes from having a torn hem or a scraped knee, but something huge and frightening. Black and unknown. If she gave it voice she would pull the house down around their ears. So she took a deep breath and kept it to herself, inside her head. They were dead. All of them. Mama. Papa. Hans. How did they die? By a bomb? How long had they been dead? Why had they not told her? The questions made her feel angry. There were so many of them and yet she did not want to know the answers to them.
Five minutes ago her life had been good. Her parents were not here, but she had everything else that she needed. Five minutes ago there was kugel for dinner and, afterwards, she would be allowed to stay up to listen to a play on the radio with Uncle Samuel. Tomorrow she would go to school and do that rotten maths test, then afterwards go to Margaret’s house and flirt with her Irish cousins. In five minutes everything had changed. Her family was dead. They were never coming for her. She was alone. Five minutes ago the people downstairs were her beloved auntie and uncle. Now they were strangers who had lied to her. She hated them. She hated them for not telling her the truth. And she hated them for not lying. They could have told her that her family was still alive. That they would all be coming for her. Soon. After the war.
The pain in her chest just kept getting bigger and bigger but as Sheila lay on her bed and waited for the tears, she realized that she could not cry alone. She had never cried alone. When she was small, she would go to Auntie, wrap her hands around her waist, press her face into her large, soft bosom and weep into the buttery smell of her cooking apron. Or her uncle would sit her up on his lap at the piano and teach her how to play ‘Für Elise’, complaining and laughing when her frizzy black curls got caught in his greying beard.
But that seemed a long time ago now. Now, in the last five minutes, everything had changed. Love was not the same as pity and she would
not
go downstairs and endure the pity of the two people she had decided, in her sudden, shocked fury, were strangers now.
Big girls don’t cry, and she was a big girl now. Her family was gone and she was on her own.
There would be no tears. Not today.
County Mayo, Ireland, Summer 1958
I
T
WAS
a hot day and Patrick Murphy was heading down to Gilvarry’s lake for a swim with his friends. The small lake was easily accessible from the town, a twenty-minute barefoot stroll across three flat green grazing fields. However, that month Mickey Gilvarry had taken possession of a new stud bull so his fields were out of bounds. The lads had to walk forty minutes at a brisk pace along the stony road in their boots. It had been a good summer, with spells of hot sun between the rain, so the boys’ faces and chests were weathered from a hard week’s work. Brendan Kelly had been picking and bagging potatoes, his brother, Tony, cutting turf and Patrick bringing in hay on his father’s small farm. This was the three young men’s day off and as the dusty air stung their burnt skin, they cursed Mickey’s bull for making their journey to the cold water of the lake longer than it needed to be.