Once Upon a Time in England

by Helen Walsh

  ‘Thank you … I … er … you’re very kind,’ he spluttered, truly lost for words now. ‘I … em … I’m sure we’d all just like to thank the, erm … the real stars of the show, Feargal and er …’ He shot an embarrassed glance at the two men standing to the left of him. They laughed and yelled out their names. ‘One more time, if you will. Thank you. Put your hands together for Peter and Feargal then … that’s the spirit. Thank you. God bless.’

  Robbie grazed the audience, incredulous at the response. He’d never wooed a crowd like that before, never – and he wouldn’t in a hundred years have thought St Stephen’s capable of such an outpouring of sheer emotion. But then they hadn’t heard him sing like that and they’d probably never heard music like that. Not there, in their local club. The regulars had grown bloated on the mandatory cabaret standards, week in, week out – but Robbie Fitzgerald had blown all that away tonight. That nervous vaulting in his guts on first sight of Vaughan had crystalised into something big and magical. At first Feargal’s ragged style of five-string banjo jarred with the regulars, hoping for a smoother ride. But then Robbie’s vocals kicked in. His gorgeously forlorn croon seemed to flood the room with one prolonged and delirious strafe, stroking conversations to a lull. A knot of chairs and torsos, bent to their neighbours’ small talk, twisted back round towards the stage. Cigarettes hovered in mid-air, never to meet the puckering lips that sought them, and by the time Robbie had reached the final refrain of Hank Williams’ ‘Your Cheating Heart’, a stunned silence had descended upon the small and smoky salon of St Stephen’s. Standing up there now, Robbie felt as stunned as they did.

  Behind the veils of smoke Vaughan’s eyes nettled with tears. Like the rest of the room, he was gone. Robbie Fitzgerald had him transfixed, utterly caught up in the ferocious beauty of his voice. He had never heard a voice so visceral and honest, so needy and hungry and splintered with pain. He didn’t think it possible to transform the jarring, maudlin wail of bluegrass into something so profound and sensual. That voice planted a hankering in his groin, ripping the skin from his flesh in one violent tug. And as the smokescreen lifted, Vaughan appraised the young flame-haired minstrel with mounting disbelief. He took in the flat boxer’s nose; the wild green eyes; the litter of scars that marked his face and the fading shamrock inked between his thumb and forefinger. He observed Robbie’s cheap cheesecloth shirt, his high-waisted pinstripe bags and his two-tone shoes gleaming defiantly in the spotlight, and he wondered how this crude male could radiate such beauty.

  As the crowd erupted Vaughan felt that rare but shrill sensation of mad, mad excitement coursing up his spine. He’d known it on a handful of occasions, sometimes to his chagrin as record companies and publishers beat him to the catch. He wasn’t letting this one slip away. He scanned the room. There was every kind of punter in the club, young and old – jazz lovers, big band fans, young stylish Motown mothers all jostled with the regular weekend drunks who’d dance to anything. Robbie’s plangent, quavering voice had got to each and every one of them. With Vaughan’s canny guidance, the lad had the power to seduce the nation. Dickie laughed at the random nature of his find. You walk into a club – any old club – and this! He shook his head, still emotional. He’d seen it all, Dickie Vaughan, but this wonderful business of show never failed to surprise and delight him.

  Susheela glanced nervously at the kitchen clock – a china plate, with gold stencilled numerals. Another ten minutes had elapsed, and Robbie was seriously late. A slow trickle of perspiration rolled down her neck, halting in the cleft of her cleavage. She turned off the oven, feeling foolish at her disposability, her fringe role in the evening’s events. Robbie was out there, living it. It was work, but he loved it. It was a life. It was his life. Susheela? She stayed at home with their son. She waited for Robbie’s return. She warmed the plates. How love’s young dream had delivered for her! A chaste little box at the heart of the worst estate in Orford, where she played out time, day after day, waiting for the new baby to announce its arrival. Another little Fitzgerald half-chat. Even when they were joking, the Orford people frightened her. With Robbie by her side it was different. It was grudging, but she had respect. When he was out at work she was completely and utterly alone. Even her friends from the ward found a trip into the badlands of Orford a trip too far and the first time round she’d lingered on in the cocoon of the hospital well beyond her confinement time. She couldn’t tell Robbie – he was working all hours as it was – but apart from little Vincent, the only brown faces she ever saw were the doctors and nurses at Warrington General. It was all very well for Robbie; he had a life to lead. For Susheela this was the highlight of the week. Warming the plates for their Saturday night takeaway.

  But when she glanced across at the slumbering figure of her Little Man, little Vincent Fitzgerald, her heart was swept away by the force and the swell of her love for him. She shuffled across and covered his head with kisses. How could she even have thought those things? She loved her time at home with her inquisitive boy. At five years old Vincent’s personality was steadily forming, giving her a glimpse of the young man he might become. Already he displayed a preference for adult company, rebuffing the offers from next door’s brood to come and play, choosing instead to stay indoors with his mother. He spent long slabs of the school holidays fussing around in his bedroom with only his Noddy books and the gentle puttering of the radio for company. Susheela marvelled at his quiet, industrious nature and imagined that he might become a doctor or a lawyer. The thought shot her stomach with a little frisson of delight.

  She dawdled back to the kitchen, sighed hard and relit the oven. She clicked the light off again, and watched the snow. It spun around the roofs of the low-rises like the squall in a paperweight. She strained her eyes. Beyond the low-rises she thought she could make out the lights from the tower blocks, slowly blinking awake, standing sentinel over the estate. She wondered if they, too, were snowgazing. She’d come to despise Orford but she loved the different inflections of the tower blocks. Sometimes, in the summer, they’d refract the red sunset off their windows like a wild fire, and she’d ache for Kuala Lumpur – the big glass towers behind the temple which would ripple like an army of glass spaceships in the midday haze.

  She tried to recapture the warm careless blush of before. It was impossible. She felt helpless. Somewhere out there the love of her life might slowly, irredeemably be slipping away from her. Typically, he would leave the club just as soon as his set ended and he’d trousered his fee, stopping only for fish and chips on the way home. He knew Susheela lit the oven at 10.45 and put the plates in at 10.50. It was now a quarter to midnight.

  She tried to resist the dark thoughts lapping at her subconscious, but as the minutes toiled by she caved. She’d seen it with her own eyes, seen how those barmaids looked at him – those hot bold looks they shot him. Did they care about Susheela’s feelings? She doubted they even noticed her. And she’d seen how his very presence rendered even her own friends giddy and girly. It had shocked her at first how Robbie didn’t pick up on this, how totally impervious he was to their admiration. But now she was married to him, she could see that Robbie didn’t think of himself as handsome. He’d stand with her in the mirror and point to his slain, pulpy nose which he saw as a tell-all about his background.

  Susheela had fallen in love with that man, and that nose. Each dent and bump told out their history. She’d been there, on duty, the night they wheeled him in, barely conscious, his nose splayed across his left cheekbone pumping blood into the stung slits of his eyes. She’d sat in as the ENT consultant probed his fingers around the bloody mire and shook his head, frowning upon it as though it were an unsolvable puzzle. And she’d been there in the room weeks later when his cast had peeled back to reveal his new face. She’d watched him confront the mirror and sensed his disappointment. She’d wheeled him back to the ward. He’d been embarrassed to look at her. The flirty, ebullient quips he’d lavished on her from behind his plaster cast were replaced by
a sad, brooding silence. He seemed disgusted with himself, and was at pains to let her know he hadn’t caused the fight. He’d been jumped by four lads. Susheela loved him for that, for his embarrassment. Saturday night dragged dozens of Robbie Fitzgeralds into Warrington General – the brawlers, the drunks, their girlfriends, their victims – often all four bound up in the one bloodied casualty. Most of them showed little remorse and took great pride in regaling the medics with blow-by-blow reenactments of their heroics. Sometimes, Susheela would catch them post-surgery, appraising the splendour of their war wounds, surrounded by admiring comrades. Often they’d seem dejected once their gaping, gushing injuries had been swabbed and stitched so prettily they were barely grazes. Not Robbie. He seemed to shrink away from the dangerous edge his nose now lent his battle-scarred face, at odds with the tender and reticent soul beneath.

  It was that contradiction in Robbie that had hit every nurse on Ward 23. Everyone flitted round the flame-haired honey, the more so when news seeped out he was a middling local songster. On the day of his discharge there was a frenetic scramble for his number. Susheela was faintly revulsed by the audacity of her pals, and quietly jealous, too. Oh how she wished she could exhibit herself like that: the saucy walk, their bottoms twitching as they passed, the little glance back over their shoulder making sure he’d had his fill. She couldn’t even muster the mettle to reassure him about his nose! She wanted to tell him what a proud, handsome specimen it was, and how it complemented the brilliance of his eyes. Instead she had overcompensated for her nervousness by adopting a brusque, no-nonsense tone with Robbie and, to the baffled ire of more worldly nurses, the ice queen act paid off. When Robbie left the ward that day, Susheela’s had been the only number he took with him. He’d weaseled it out of the stony-faced matron – a feat that still made her smile, whenever she thought on it.

  Those first, tentative dates and days out were as close as Susheela had come to the magical romances of her storybooks back home. Although she wanted to dance and dress up and show out, she quickly understood that Robbie preferred to avoid the crowded pubs and discos in town, and just as quickly, she came to love that in him, too. The solitary, yearning poet, striding out into the countryside, filling his lungs with fresh air. She could see the care drop away from his shoulders the further out they travelled, into Derbyshire and the Peak District or the Derwent Valley – great potholes and dripping, echoing caverns one day, heart-stopping panoramas from a crumbling hilltop wall the next.

  She could understand why Robbie craved the wide open spaces and cold fresh skies. His other life was indoors; the factory by day, then, most nights of the week, the clubs. And if she thought she loved him when his great huge hands would belt her dainty waist as he lifted her, effortlessly, over a mountain stile, her heart almost stopped the first time she heard him sing. She’d had to beg him, daily, to let her come along. Then one Saturday afternoon, sat on the ridge up by Daresbury, he sighed out loud, ‘If they stare, right? Take no notice.’ And it dawned on her he was saying yes. Stare at her? She didn’t care about that! Of course people were going to stare, she was the only brown face in town, just about. But she was going to see Robbie sing, and she could barely keep the giggles down inside.

  He made sure she had a good table, made sure the steward at the Legion treated her like a VIP, but Susheela didn’t even want a Coca-Cola. She’d sat there, rapt, waiting – and when her man came on, he nearly blew her soul to dust. It was spellbinding. It was heartbreaking. Nervously, at first, glancing, rather than staring at his lover, he romped through a few Motown classics: ‘Band of Gold’; ‘Jimmy Mack’; ‘River Deep Mountain High’. And his voice just blistered right through her, turning her stomach sick. That was her Robbie, there. That was her man! And then he did it. He came to her side of the small stage, crooked his left knee and took all his weight on his right hip, closed his eyes, tilted his head back and sang ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’.

  And when he opened his eyes, he saw his little brown angel, streaks of mascara-black tears flooding her beautiful face.

  She loved that time, those first few weeks and months. She loved Robbie, loved his heart, his dreams, his plans. She loved to cling to his waist as they raced through the countryside on his motorcycle, past streams, and glades and hillocks – the England of her dreams. She loved it when he’d suddenly pull over and race her to the top of a hill. One time, they’d stood there, drinking in the view, holding it down, his strong, thick wrists around her waist as he held her from behind, his chin resting on her shoulder.

  ‘Ours, that,’ he’d said.

  She’d nodded, and gazed out upon the green, green pastures, a land of verdant plenty spread out beneath them.

  ‘We should do it, you know. You and me.’

  And she could feel, with her back to him, just exactly what he was trying to say. Within the year, they were married.

  Susheela could deal with the way women looked at Robbie. She even allowed herself to feel smug. That’d be as close as any of them ever got – looks. But gazes, glances, admiring darts of the eyes belonged to the daylight. They were harmless gestures – the ritualistic extremes of daytime coquetry. It was night-time she feared most keenly. Night-time aroused them to verbal liberties and dispatched them to the flesh. Night-time meant drink, and Susheela’s time on the ward had taught her there were no limits to a Warrington girl’s ambitions once she’d had a drink. Now the picture was emerging, she succumbed fully and tormented herself with its crude and rampant immediacy. Her half-sozzled husband talking, smiling with a young girl – blonde and fair and flat of stomach, her hand brushing his arm, kohl-caked eyelashes fluttering an unmistakeable promise. She buried her head. What could she do about it? She was pregnant, for goodness’ sake, pregnant with Robbie’s child! She pictured him with Chrissy Taylor, the barmaid with the huge breasts, always displayed to their best in a low-cut top.

  She padded back to the window, bereft. Her Robbie was out there and she only had herself to blame. Her work pals had warned her all right. ‘His needs don’t stop just cos you’re pregnant, love,’ they’d jeered when she was carrying Vincent. She’d made the mistake of telling them she found intercourse uncomfortable. ‘There’s more than one way to milk your man!’

  Her huge brown eyes had blinked back the tears, trying so hard to force a plucky smile, but their vile prognosis curdled in her ears. She’d tried to relieve Robbie, oh God how she’d tried. Many a night his hard member had pressed tentatively into the flesh of her rump, just to let her know – and she’d lain there, listening to his soft anguished whimpers, wanting so badly to comfort him. Her hand would reach down to him, but somehow she couldn’t go through with it. The vulgarity of it was more than she could bear. Her husband’s member would slink back, rest sadly against his thigh. Oh how she’d give anything for one more chance. Poor Robbie. All that unslaked love and desire churning his groin, raging through his veins, waiting to explode like a bomb. All those brazen blondes out there, waiting to detonate him.

  Three

  The moment Robbie stepped off stage Vaughan swooped on him, guiding him into the dim recesses of the back bar. Regulars hovered in speculative clusters as word seeped out about Vaughan’s identity. The more hard-faced of the regulars pushed within earshot, sending back unreliable bush wires on the latest developments. St Stephen’s was abuzz with the babble of excited speculation. On one thing they could all agree – Robbie Fitz was going to be big.

  Eventually Robbie’s beaming, half-bashful face emerged and he was engulfed by well-wishers before he’d got three feet inside the lounge. The men, emboldened by drink and swept away by this tide of communal bonhomie, shuffled over and presented him with pint upon pint of the black stuff. He sipped at one, but was still in a state of shock. Women yo-yoed back and forth to the toilets to freshen their coy smiles and plump up their décolletages. The night rang with drunken attestations as to how well and for how long each had known their home-grown hero.

  Robbie just sat there
, face glowing, incandescent with pride. He felt a surge of fondness for these people. He wanted to tell them everything, but superstition held him back. Nothing had been signed yet, and if anyone was going to hear his news it would be Susheela. She would be first with the low-down. He had to suppress a giggle as he pictured her eyes – easy to surprise – widening with each new opportunity: the special guest spot at the Talk of the North. The recording contract. The near certainty of a turn on New Faces. It was only agreed with a gentleman’s handshake, but it was Dickie Vaughan’s handshake, and it still warmed his palm. And had Robbie followed him out into the icy night, he would have seen Dickie Vaughan jump up and punch the air before lowering his massive frame down into his snowbound E-type.

  Robbie was no lounge lizard, but he was powerless in the face of all this goodwill. He was overwhelmed by it, really, and he had to admit he’d have liked to have stayed longer. As it was, it was already past eleven thirty when Robbie finally extricated himself from his woozy acolytes, his swoon of self-pleasure eventually pierced by images of his hungry and stranded young wife. He’d sipped his first sup of stardrops and it tasted delicious.

  He marched through the snow, the cold night air blasting the sweat from his brow and ripping through the damp of his hair. There was a slight unease that he hadn’t returned Irene’s musicians as promised, but how often did nights like tonight come along? The band had been a part of the magic, and he’d left them at the bar surrounded by glad-handers, basking in his reflected glory. News would have got back to Iye by now – she’d know all about Dickie Vaughan and she’d be pleased for Robbie. He knew she would.