Chapter Text
Tommy calls on Sunday, as promised.
Even though she’s the one who suggested it, even though he’d agreed, Lizzie has been half-expecting the day to pass without the ring of the telephone. Not necessarily because he doesn’t want to talk to his son, but because she knows how easily he gets distracted by work – and after a month’s absence, after spending all that time thinking he was dying, there’s no doubt an endless amount that he feels he has to do, with the business and with the politics both. He’s never been good at delegating, and work has always come first for him. Always.
She hasn’t told Charles about seeing his father last week. He’s struggling enough, the poor kid, without having his hopes raised. He’s taken the last few months so hard. Losing his sister, and barely seeing his father, and then Lizzie walking away from the marriage…it’s not been easy for him. Lizzie loves him with all her heart, and she’s selfishly glad that he chose to come with her, but she knows he’s having a tough time. She knows she can’t make up for what he lacks. For all Tommy’s faults, he’s still Charles’s father, and poor little Charlie desperately wants his father’s love and care. He doesn’t need to have his hopes raised just to be dashed yet again.
But the telephone rings at eleven o’clock on the dot. Charles is studying, some homework he’s put off until this morning when Lizzie had put her foot down, and she’s doing not very much of anything, just staring out of the window, nursing a cup of tea and watching storm clouds come closer and closer. The ringing phone makes them both jump, a raucous intruder on their silence. Charlie’s chewing on the end of his pencil, an awful habit that Tommy hates but that Lizzie finds rather endearing.
“Mum,” he prompts her, when she doesn’t move fast enough for his liking. “Mum, the phone.”
“Yes, thank you, Charles,” she says, a trifle sarcastically. He smiles cheekily, and turns back to his books as Lizzie rises and crosses to the phone. It won’t be Tommy, she tells herself. He’ll have forgotten, or lost track of time, and it’s a good thing she didn’t tell Charlie because the last thing he needs is another disappointment. It’s probably one of the women from the local Women’s Institute, something she’s joined to keep herself from sitting around thinking too much. Whether they like her for herself, or for any influence she might have as an MP’s wife, she doesn’t yet know and doesn’t yet care. They’re supposed to be independent, non-partisan, but she’s too jaded to believe that.
Anyway, the phone call won’t be Tommy. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s how she is, to him. Out of sight, out of bloody mind.
“Hello, Mrs Shelby’s residence,” she says into the phone. There’s a moment’s silence, almost like the line hasn’t quite connected. And then:
“Hello, Lizzie.”
She grips the handset so tightly it hurts, and automatically shifts so her back is to Charles. “Hello, Tommy,” she says. From behind her, she hears a sharp inhalation. Maybe she should have warned him after all, but she couldn’t have borne his look of resigned unhappiness, if Tommy hadn’t called. “I wasn’t sure if –,” She cuts herself off, not wanting Charles to hear that particular doubt. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be ringing this morning or later on,” she lies, trying to keep any note of recrimination out of her voice.
“You said Sunday,” he reminds her. If he realises what she’d started to say, he doesn’t call her on it. “I can ring again later if it’s a bad time.” Lizzie doesn’t speak. She twists the phone cable around her fingers, fidgeting to keep from saying anything she would regret letting Charles hear. “How are you, Lizzie?” he asks. He doesn’t sound distracted, the way he sometimes does on the phone – like he’s doing something else at the same time, and the phone conversation is an afterthought. The question isn’t casual. He’s focused on the phone call, on her. It’s unsettling; she’s not used to it.
“I’m fine,” she says. She can’t tell him the truth. Not with how things are between them, and not with Charles in the room. She won’t tell him that it’s none of his business how she is, that he has no right to her pain. She can’t tell him that she lies awake at night, thinking about everything he’d told her, last Sunday on Armistice Day, when he’d turned up out of the blue like a ghost in the dark. She doesn’t want to tell him how her heart leaped at the sound of his voice, nor that it’s Christmas in six weeks and she has no idea how she’s going to get through it without Ruby.
“Charles is here,” she says instead. “Hold on a moment.” She rests the handset down and turns around, reaching out a hand towards her stepson. “Come on,” she invites. “Your father’s called to talk to you.”
Charles puts down his pencil, very neatly, in the crease of his workbook. “Do I have to?” he asks. There’s a great deal hiding in his expression, just behind his eyes. Ruby had always been most like Tommy, in looks and temperament – Charles mostly takes after his mother – but sometimes they’re very alike. It makes Lizzie’s heart ache. She wonders if this is how Tommy had looked as a boy, with a wandering father and a dead mother. Guarded and unwilling to be hurt.
“I’d like you to,” she says, instead of answering directly. “He’s called especially for you.” It’s perhaps a cheap shot, to suggest he does it for her, but she’s been this boy’s mother for seven years, and she knows how to coax him into doing things. She knows, too, that whatever he feels on the surface, underneath is a bone-deep longing for his father. “Come on,” she invites again, gesturing him over to her. For a long, long moment, she doesn’t think he will. Then he pushes back his chair and walks slowly, deliberately, across the room towards her and the phone. When he picks up the handset and says a cautious ‘hello’, Lizzie goes back to her seat and her cold cup of tea.
The conversation can barely be called that. Charles’s answers are almost monosyllabic – curt, brief answers to whatever questions Tommy is asking. ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘maybe’, he says, and Lizzie closes her eyes and imagines Tommy’s frustration, his unhappiness. She doesn’t doubt he loves his children – his son. He’s just never been any good at showing it, not to any of them – not to his children, not to his wife, not to his family. His love is cold, it’s harsh, and it’s expressed through money, more often than not. But Tommy should know as well as anyone that a child’s love for a parent is ultimately, inevitably, conditional. Money and fine clothes and plentiful food help keep it alive for a while, but time and warmth and affection are what Charles is sorely in need of, and those are things Tommy has rarely been able to give anyone.
Ruby had been the great exception. Just Ruby. And now she’s gone, and with her had gone any warmth in Tommy. Charlie’s felt it as keenly as Lizzie has. And God knows, she’s not expected to ever again discover any in her husband, but then she thinks about the other night, on Armistice Day, when he’d finally let her see him break down over Ruby, and it makes her wonder.
‘I’m alive,’ he’d said. Alive. She remembers believing him. The hurt and the doubt and the anguish have crept back in, since then, but now she listens to Charles talking to his father on the phone, and she wonders.
“Yeah, I ‘spose,” Charles says. “I’ll ask her. Mum?” Lizzie looks up at him, summoning a smile from somewhere. “Dad says him and me could go for a ride next Sunday, if you say yes,” he tells her. It’s not entirely a request, though she’s sure Tommy had phrased it that way. He wouldn’t have in the past, but he’d been so careful, the other night, to say he would see Charles only if the boy wanted it.
“D’you want to?” she asks him. She won’t force him. A telephone call is one thing, this is another. She won’t force him. If he says no, that’ll be that. But he shrugs, like he can’t quite decide which is better – to cling to his resentment, or to agree to the request. She reaches for a cigarette, and lights it before speaking again. “If you’d like to, go,” she says, not looking at him as she speaks. She doesn’t want to influence him. “Just let me know what time you have to be ready, and be back before supper.”
Charles is silent for almost too long. Then at last he tells his father: “Mum says yes, but I’ve to be back for supper.” He’s quiet again, listening to whatever Tommy says, and then he mumbles a goodbye, but doesn’t hang up. “He wants to talk to you again, Mum,” he says.
“Alright.” Lizzie takes his place and brings the phone to her ear, though she thinks she’d rather claw her own eyes out. Charles slinks back to the table and his homework, but he doesn’t pick up his pencil again, choosing instead to stare out of the window just like Lizzie had earlier. She won’t reprimand him for it. “I’m here, Tommy,” she says.
“Lizzie. I’ll be by Sunday, then. Thought we’d go out and have a bit of lunch, me and him, and a ride.”
She can’t remember the last time he did anything like that for Charles, or even for Ruby. Family outings, those had happened – the four of them together. Half the time there’d been an ulterior motive, some business connection. Or even just needing to be seen as a family man. But not always, and anyway, the children hadn’t noticed that. They hadn’t cared, just happy spending time with their daddy. It all feels a long time ago, now.
“Alright,” she agrees. “That’s fine with me.” There’s a WI meeting next Sunday afternoon anyway, something about fundraising for an allotment for the local school. She’s agreed to go, though it would be easier just to write a cheque. There’s always Shelby money for good causes, these days, even after the crash. That’s not really how the WI operates, though, and anyway, it’s a casual enough engagement that if Tommy doesn’t turn up, if he disappoints his son yet again, it’ll be easy to cancel.
She glances at Charles, sees his expression, and knows she doesn’t need to wonder if he’s entertaining similar thoughts. He’s learned not to count on Thomas Shelby. It’s a lesson that’s taken her far, far longer to learn.
“I’ll be there, Lizzie,” Tommy says, as if he knows what she’s thinking. “Eleven o’clock. I’ll be there.”
She doesn’t bother to reassure him. That’s not her job any longer.
“He’ll be waiting,” she says instead, a quiet warning. Tommy is silent, but she hears him sigh, a long exhalation that betrays his understanding. She listens to him breathing, hears noises in the background and tries to work out where he is. Not the office, it’s too loud for that. Not the pub. Maybe the shop, but she’s not sure. It’s Sunday, but gambling starts at nine, Sunday or not. And she’d told him to go to Watery Lane. Maybe he listened to her, for once in his bloody life. After all, it’s not like he’s got any other home, not anymore. He’s blown up Arrow House, and he’d said his wagon had burned. No home, no place to lay his head. Just a wandering Gypsy.
He might be in London, of course. There’s still the London flat. She’s never thought of it as home, though. She’s stayed there with him, but it’s an impersonal place. A place just for working and eating and sleeping, she’s always thought, and Tommy only really does one of those. But there’s too much noise for him to be at the London flat.
Her cigarette is burning down. She stubs it out in the nearest ash tray. She’d only lit it to keep her hands busy, after all.
She means to ask him if he has anything to tell her. He’d promised, after all, and a week’s gone by – there will be things to tell. He’d been heading towards his own death, a month ago, but a week is plenty of time for Thomas Shelby to start hatching plans. There’s still Moseley, there’s still Churchill, there’s still the business. He’d promised she’d know it all.
She means to ask him, but she looks at Charlie again, and sees the strain on his face, and makes a decision. She can say no, she reminds herself. If he meant what he said, last week, he can bloody well wait for her to be ready, this once.
“I’d better go,” she says. “I’ve got a lot to do. We’ll see you next week.”
She hangs up without letting him say goodbye. It’s bitterly, grimly rewarding to keep the last word for herself.