CHAPTER TWENTY:
EVERYWHERE, EVERYTHING

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

HELEN WAS AWARE OF everything. The chipped green paint peeling from the door like the raw pink mess of sunburnt skin. The murmur of voices on the other side, deep and inaudible, settling in the marrow of her bones. Lizzie’s Woodbines smelled heavenly as their smoke shrouded the kitchen. After she’d returned from retrieving Tommy, she had taken to smoking with the window cracked open, but the wind was strong outside that morning and it pushed the scent of them back towards the table where Helen was sitting with Polly and Esme. Esme’s breathing was loud in the silence; in through the nose, out through the mouth, as if she’d just finished running a marathon. Helen thought she could smell excess alcohol on her breath from the night before. She was glaring at the door, lying in wait. Helen knew why.

Seconds crawled into minutes. Time moved slow enough that Helen swore she could see it in the air, marching forward step-by-step, disappearing into the shadows of a horizon she was forever chasing. If she reached out, she could graze her fingertips through it like sand. She could take it for herself, rewinding the minutes and the seconds that had escaped her at her own convenience. Instead, she pressed her fists into her lap, tugging at her skirt mindlessly. 

The door opened. Helen couldn’t help it, she looked up. Tommy glanced from her to the other women. Polly’s head leaned back with a cool, wet towel folded to shield her eyes, Esme shoving from the table to stand further away from him, the subtleness of Lizzie’s smirk as she sank into Esme’s now vacant seat. He was entirely fed up with them already.

“I heard you were giving speeches off the back of a wagon, Pol,” he said, removing the cigarette that was perched between his lips. 

Polly groaned. “I can’t remember a fucking thing.”

Helen smothered a smile into the palm of her hand. For just a second, she met Tommy’s gaze, caught up in the warmth of shared amusement. She was quick to turn away, dropping her hand to reveal her smile was gone. Tommy continued to watch her for a moment before addressing Polly again.

“Moss tells me you were threatening to burn down the town hall.”

“Oh, Tommy,” Polly sighed as she removed the wet towel from her face. “We were having a laugh.”

That wasn’t quite how Helen remembered it, but close enough. 

“You know, actually, the crowd around me was bigger than the crowd around Jessie Eden.”

Polly was proud of it, too. Her eyes gleamed with remnants of hunger, of desire for that fleeting feeling of elation. Helen had seen it clear as day. The way Polly soared above the crowd, weightless in time and memory. The crowd was like a moth to a flame. Hunger had captured them, too, for the power that coursed through her veins. 

“Who’s Jessie Eden?” Tommy asked.

“She’s too soft,” answered Polly indirectly. “You’re not gonna break the capitalist system by talking about separate lavatories for women.”

“Maybe not,” Helen conceded. She kept a close eye on Polly as she staggered to her feet, the white towel as it dripped water on the floorboards reminded her of spitting rain. “But she has spirit. And she has ideas that nearly all women can agree with.”

Tommy was silent. Slowly, every eye returned to him. “Who’s Jessie Eden?”

Lizzie was the first to pity on him. “She’s her new best friend.”

“Shop steward at the Lucas Factory,” Esme added, sauntering over to stand beside Polly in a silent display of support.

“A woman shop steward,” Tommy commented. He wet the end of his cigarette against the soft pink swell of his lower lip, inhaling the smoke into his lungs and holding it there -- holding, holding. He wielded that smoke like a gun on a battlefield. Always in control, even then. “I’ve heard of her.”

Helen’s back slumped against the hard wooden slats of her chair. She felt listless; bones, sinew, organs. Everything had been picked apart and rearranged by hands that did not know her. Pieces of her were put back in the wrong places. Her heart was where her stomach used to be, beating away in time with her baby’s kicking. She pressed her hands tighter, as if she could stop it, catch it in her hand and crush it. Blood and bits dripping from her fingertips. She, too, would be weightless.

“There is a leaflet here,” she heard Lizzie’s voice say. “If you want to take a look, Tommy.”

She offered him the leaflet. Hands pale and steady. They didn’t touch Tommy yet Helen burned, simmering on. He flicked through the pages lazily, pausing on some parts but skimming over the majority.

“So, a separate lavatory,” he murmured. “Is that it? Is that what you want?”

Disappointment reared its head, violent and ugly. Lizzie and Helen exchanged a look as Lizzie put out her cigarette in the glass ashtray Polly kept at the centre of the table. Esme rolled her eyes, throwing up her hands while Polly merely sighed and shook her head. She started to fuss with her curls, smoothing them back out of their disarray. Replacing the frayed image with a new one, fresh and clean and put together.

Tommy’s jaw clenched, the muscles flexing in resistance. “I don’t know what you want. You have to tell me what it is that you want and then I’ll know.”

“Actually,” said Esme slyly. “We want to know about the robbery you’re planning. And not the factory one, the other one. The one you’re not telling the women about.”

“John has a big mouth.”

“No. Arthur’s got a big mouth. Arthur told Linda, Linda told me.”

At first, neither of them moved. They waited on opposite sides of the table, heartstrong, until Tommy’s cigarette was in embers and he had to look around in his pockets for a new one.

“Read the leaflet, Tommy,” Lizzie said, desperately trying to forget Esme’s bold words, the way their purpose had been forgotten.

Tommy didn’t acknowledge her. “Polly.”

Helen recognised that tone. “I think that's our cue.”

Polly brushed a hand over her shoulder in passing. “Why don’t I talk to Tommy privately and then I’ll report back to you faithfully?”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Helen agreed as she stood up. The floor swayed beneath her feet. Quickly, she steadied herself, pinned down by Tommy’s eyes once more. “Wait outside with me, Esme?”

But Esme wasn’t quite ready to give up just yet. She closed the distance between herself and Tommy, her voice a hissed whisper that Helen could barely hear. “You’re not just gonna take payment from the Russians, are you, Tommy? You’re going to clear them out, is that right?”

“Esme,” Helen said her name again, but as her voice rose in volume, so did Esme’s.

“So what happens after, when they come for us? When I’m about to give birth? When Helen is about to give birth? That is, if you’re still leading her around like a mouse on a string--”

Helen winced. Tommy’s voice was calm but she knew Esme had struck a chord. If she wasn’t his brother’s wife. If she wasn’t pregnant. . .

“Get out,” he said, pointing his cigarette in her face. “Get back to work.”

“Esme, come on.” Lizzie grabbed her elbow and tried to guide her past Tommy through the open door. He took up most of the space, reducing Esme to the size he wanted her to be; small, smaller than him, than this entire operation. A cog in a machine that only he manoeuvred. 

Resigned, Esme nodded at Polly. “Keep us posted, won’t you, sister?”

“I will.”

Shrugging off Lizzie, Esme marched out of the kitchen with her nose in the air and head held high. Lizzie hovered, looking back at Helen. “Aren’t you coming?”

Polly remained tight-lipped, as did Tommy. He’d slipped away again. And again. And again. Helen let out a sigh, accepting Lizzie’s arm linked through her own. She drew closer to Tommy, inhaling the scent of him that clung to the air, this constant reminder that he was real and utterly inescapable. She knew she wasn’t wanted in the room for this particular conversation, but she had a few things of her own she wanted Tommy to hear. She clutched the sleeve of his coat, pausing, keenly aware of Polly pacing the room and Lizzie’s warm breath on her neck.

“Meet me outside after,” she told him, then turned to say to Lizzie as they retreated to the sound of the door slamming shut, “I need some fresh air, I think.”

Tommy waited until he was sure they were gone, then muttered an exhausted ‘fucking hell’ under his breath and moved to collapse at the table. The chair legs scraped harshly against the ground, like nails on a chalkboard, the wood bowing under the sudden weight of him. He gestured impatiently for Polly to join him, putting out his cigarette and burying the image of Helen’s face beneath the ash.

The way she had looked at him. She was so good at evading him, yet he knew that one expression. So much sadness, so much hatred. For this, for him. There were too many secrets between them; one-by-one, they were being unburied, but it would take them forever to find a semblance of true understanding. Tommy didn’t have forever. 

“So Arthur tells Linda everything, eh?”

“She’s stolen his soul and taken it to a better place,” said Polly, lips pursed. “The suburbs. Where men are honest with their wives. You know we can trust Helen. Lizzie, too.”

“Yeah,” Tommy snapped. “But I can’t trust Esme. I can’t trust the fucking Russians to pay me what they owe me, and I can’t trust my own brother to keep his fucking mouth shut.”

Polly’s expression was suddenly one of amusement. The abrupt change made Tommy’s stomach twist. Which brother? His mind was taunting him. He couldn’t trust Arthur to keep a secret from Linda. Now, it seemed, he couldn’t trust John not to burden Helen with the truth of what he did behind her back. She knew. He couldn’t pretend that she didn’t. She was waiting for him outside and Tommy dreaded the thought of having to admit he’d felt the touch of other women, that he tasted them on his tongue, the phantom memory of kisses she would never be privy to. Guilt was a hard pill to swallow, harder than misery. The knife was his own to land on.

“Did you make progress last night?” Polly asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Yes.”

“John said the girl looks like Edna Purviance from the pictures,” she commented, clicking her tongue for good measure. “Be careful.”

Tommy exhaled sharply. “She’s an excellent source of information regarding the location of the merchandise.”

“Here we go.”

“You know, there’s a general lack of discipline in this fucking company!” His hands actually shook as he shoved one through his gelled hair, the other distracting his mouth with another long drag of his cigarette.

If eyes were windows to the soul, Polly’s were chasms to the core of the Earth. “She stayed the night.”

“Yes.”

“Helen knows.”

“Yes,” he groaned, letting his eyes close. “Fuck.”

“You’re grieving. And when you grieve, you make bad choices,” she murmured. “Helen’s no stranger to that grief, Thomas. Don’t be so sure that you’ve lost her before you’ve even found your way back.”

He desperately wanted to tell her that she had no idea what she was talking about. He wanted to recoil into the memories of Grace, shun the past and its vices back to where it belonged. But Tommy was aware, as his aunt was, that he’d always lust for the way Helen Mavis made him come alive. She could take on a new name. She could raise children who weren’t his. She could make a better man out of him, a man who wanted more honesty from life, and Tommy would always be in love with her.

“Look, no more marches,” he stated. “No more fucking politics. It can kill us, alright? Joke or no joke.”

Polly couldn’t argue with that. “Did you tell Arthur about the priest?” she asked instead, deciding to keep women’s business to herself for now. 

Tommy shook his head. “I only told you.”

She paused, then held out a hand for one of his cigarettes. “Thanks for the burden. You should head on outside. And just remember what I said.”

But Tommy was already moving, disappearing as if he’d never been there to begin with. He traced Helen’s footsteps to the alley beside the house, pausing once he’d rounded the corner. There she stood with her eyes closed in rest, but she knew without a doubt that he was there, watching. She let her lips part, slow to form around the words that plagued her, that longed to strike where it hurt.

“Are you going to tell me, Tommy?” she asked when he stopped a few feet away.

Tommy paused to consider his response. “Why tell you something that you already know?”

Something ugly reared its head inside her. When she opened her eyes, they were dry. Part of Tommy had expected tears. He wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t yet to come, drowning him in their depths. He forced himself to feel every blow, to bear the brunt of her agony and his own mixed together.

“Did you fuck her?” 

“Who?”

“Don’t be ignorant,” she snapped at last. “The Russian Duchess. Did you fuck her?” 

Yes, he thought. I’m sorry.

“Why does it matter to you that I have?”

She wasn’t playing this game. They weren’t children. Helen’s chest was ready to burst. She longed to be free from its pressure. The first tear trailed a salty line down her cheek, dipping down the edge of her jaw to the length of her neck.

“I love you, Tommy,” she said it simply. It was the air she lived on. The blood in her veins. “I think part of me will always love you. Even as you fuck other women. But just promise me you don’t love them, that I don’t have to share your heart for much longer. Give me one thing.”

“I don’t love them,” he meant it. “It’s--”

“Business,” she said. “So I’ve heard.”

Instinctively, she reached out to trace the side of his face. Kissed his lips. Blonde hair shielded them from the rest of the world, pushed with the wind to bring them closer together. His hand pressed to hers over her stomach. He exhaled as the baby kicked again, moving for him.

“There’s more out there for us yet, Nellie,” he whispered, allowing himself some softness shielded in the shadows of the streets he knew like the lines on the palms of his hands. “You’ll see.”

She kissed a smile into his mouth. “I believe you.”

Later, she’d think about this moment and wonder if it was their last. In the gloomy haze of the afternoon, she held the phone receiver up to her ear, convinced the warmth of the plastic was his breathing through the line. She counted every exhale and committed them to memory.

“Nellie,” he was repeating her name over and over, desperate to get its syllables right on what sounded like a swollen tongue. “I need you to listen to me, eh?”

“Tell me what’s happened. Please.”

He was hurt. Every word seemed to tear him apart. Far away (too far), Tommy sat hunched over at his desk in Arrow House. Blood stuck to the side of his temple in sticky rivulets. He couldn’t see much of his fingers as they dialled the number of Arthur from muscle memory, closely followed by Helen.

He needed to tell her.

He just needed her.

“Helen, I need you to collect Charlie for me. I’m going to be in London for a while.”

“How long?” she asked, already planning how she could find him. James was peering at her curiously from the lounge. She stared back absentmindedly, her index finger tangling up the phone line. 

“I’m not sure. But I don’t want him to be on his own. Just promise me, Nellie. Take care of my boy like he’s yours.”

“Of course,” she replied. “Tommy, what have you done?”

“You’re the only one I trust with his life,” he couldn’t seem to hear her. If he did, he had to have his say first. He was running on borrowed time. If he got to hear his voice for any longer than that, he would be one lucky man. “I trust you with my life, Nel.”

“Tommy, please.”

“I love you, eh?” 

“Tommy.”

No, she thought. This isn’t right. Wake up, Helen, for God’s sake. This has to be a horrible dream. Her mind loved to make her miserable.

“All this means nothing without you.”

“Don’t go to London yet,” she exclaimed, shaking the phone like it would also shake some sense into him. “Just wait for me to pick up Charlie, alright? I can help, Tommy. We can do this together.”

Life. It was all theirs. Every single thing, good and bad, had brought them to this. A denied proposal. War. Husbands and wives that weren’t each other. Loss, so much of it, they couldn’t escape it anywhere they looked. Yet somewhere out there, the other had existed, finding their way to each other once again. Their story would never have an ending. They would be Tommy and Nellie forever, eternalised in time.

“Oh, how I love you, Nel,” he whispered. “I never thought I’d get to say it again, but I didn’t want it buried with me. I love you.”

When he hung up and she fled to Arrow House, practically dragging a confused James up that long driveway, Tommy was gone.