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IX
OLIVIA'S MEMORIES
Tommy closed the notebook sadly and stopped leaning against the wall. He had been on that cold Whitechapel sidewalk for quite some time, standing in front of a hat shop, and across the street was the Westerling family home.
He couldn't say for sure if he was gathering courage or was afraid to discover a truth that he wouldn't be able to bear. In the latter case, what would that truth have been? That Olivia was, indeed, dead? Or that she was alive in some corner of the world, hidden with the help of Ada and Polly? Tommy could not establish what caused him the most fear because the result in both scenarios would be the same: uncontrollable rage.
He crossed the street with determination and a car almost ran over him. He was distracted and his heart asked for the tranquility that only laudanum gave him. But he needed to be sober, at least as long as he was in the Westerling's house, since he didn't want to miss any detail, no matter how small it could be.
He knocked on the door and was answered by silence. On the other side of the old wooden door, absolutely nothing was heard. Tommy waited a couple of seconds and just as he was about to knock one more time, he heard slow footsteps crawl across the parquet floor inside. Before he could assume someone was going to greet him, the door opened.
The first sign was bad: the woman in front of him, short with a thick build, wore mourning clothes. She had purplish circles under her eyes that framed her dark eyes, similar to Olivia's but opaque, and her wrinkled face revealed the nights of endless crying.
"Yes?" The woman looked intimidated by Tommy's presence at her door. It was remarkable to see a man so well dressed in this area of the East End.
"Good afternoon," Tommy said, trying, that way, to reassure the woman. "My name is Thomas Shelby, OBE. I'm a Member of Parliament for South Birmingham". It took him a while to realize that most of what he had said had been unnecessary. His name would have been enough, since his rank and his position in Parliament made the woman hide a little behind the half-open door.
"Do you need something?"
"I'm Ada Thorne's brother,"
"Oh," he witnessed how the woman raised her eyebrows. "Is Ada with you?" She asked and began to look for his sister.
"No." Once again, Tommy was cursing Ada inwardly. Things would have been easier with her there. "She couldn't come, but she sent me instead," Tommy lied.
"And what does Ada need?" The woman had been less sullen since he had communicated his consanguinity with Ada.
"Some things she loaned her daughter when they both lived here in London and Olivia never took back to Birmingham."
The mere mention of Olivia caused the woman's gaze to darken again, and Tommy took the reaction as the second bad sign. Olivia's mother stood aside and with a slight wave of her hand, allowed Tommy into the house.
The Westerling's home was a small old building, and it smelled musty. The low ceiling reminded him of his old home on Small Heath and the wide, masonry-covered fireplace made him long for the simple life he'd had. His mansion was too large for the ornate stoves to evenly distribute the heat in the huge rooms. He sighed as he remembered the times he had told Olivia that he would leave his entire fortune behind and that he would go live with her in the humble brick house where, shortly after, she was found dead.
"I told Olivia it was a bad idea to go to Birmingham." Mrs. Westerling's bleak tone of voice forced him back to reality. "She told me it would be temporary until she could make a living from her poems. She was always too fanciful." Tommy watched her jaw clench.
"I'm sure she would have made a living from her poetry if…" Tommy stopped, realizing what he was about to say. He couldn't ignore the fact that he was talking to a mother whose children were all dead.
"What does Ada need, specifically?" Mrs. Westerling deflected the conversation and crossed her arms, as if trying to contain her anguish. Beyond grief, she seemed to be a strong-willed woman, and then Tommy remembered that she was a teacher.
"Some notebooks and photos. Ada told me that Olivia kept them in her room."
"Mr. Shelby, Olivia has dozens of notebooks in her room," Mrs. Westerling said. "Since she learned to write, she never stopped writing and wrote all the time. If you don't tell me a characteristic of the notebooks that belong to your sister, I won't be able to ..."
"Would you allow me to rummage through her things?" Tommy snapped. He had to take a chance and ask the question since he had discovered that he was no good at lying to broken mothers.
Mrs. Westerling seemed unconvinced at first and pondered what she had said for a couple of seconds. It was obvious that she was not amused about a stranger touching her late daughter's belongings. Tommy saw her open and close her mouth a couple of times, as if when she came up with the answer, she changed her mind, and she did so until, at last, she was able to express what was thinking.
"Okay," she agreed, "but I'll go up with you. You need to know that I allow you this because, since Olivia's death, I have not been able to touch anything that belonged to her and I plan to continue like this. When alive, she never liked me snooping through her things, "the woman confessed with disgust.
"Thank you very much, Mrs. Westerling."
"My name is Jane. Ada didn't tell you?"
"Yes," Tommy lied and swallowed, "but it seemed overconfident to call you by your name," he said. "Thank you, Jane".
As they climbed the steep, narrow stairs, Tommy imagined how angry Ada would be if she found out that he was there at the Westerling family home, using her name to rummage through Olivia's belongings. Then he realized that bringing Ada with him would have been of no use to him, because she would have refused to act in the same way as him and she would have let Jane know his true intentions.
Olivia's old room was at the end of the dark hallway. Jane Westerling opened the door warily and allowed Tommy to be the first to step into what had been her daughter's world for so many years. The poor woman did not want to be there, and as she followed Tommy's footsteps, the latter noticed that she was doing it with something close to fear. He couldn't blame her: Jane feared her emotions the same way he did, and the memory of Olivia in each of the objects threatened to overwhelm their hearts.
The place was small and packed with things. The bed was made and on it rested a significant number of stuffed animals and porcelain dolls with cracked faces. There were shelves everywhere and they were overflowing with dusty, messy books stacked on top of each other.
Tommy noted that although Olivia had left the place in early 1931, it still smelled of her. He could imagine her sitting in front of the small green table writing her poems, taking a place between her makeup and accessories. He could almost see her lying on the soft bed, surrounded by her stuffed animals, with the bookshelf above her head, threatening to throw a book at her while she slept. He imagined her searching for some garment in the old closet, the door of which was broken and bent.
"Hello again, Ollie. I missed you" , he greeted her in his thoughts when he realized that, if she was dead, her spirit had chosen to live there.
He had a hard time choosing a place to start looking. Under Jane's watchful eye, Tommy chose the wardrobe, and as he opened it, the only hinge holding the door broke and he had to use his reflexes to keep it from falling to the floor. Looking up, he noticed that the closet was full of clothes and that caught his attention: Olivia had gone to live in Birmingham without really knowing when she would return home. Why had she left so many clothes behind? Or perhaps, were those the clothes she was wearing at the time?
"Olivia had more clothes than I thought," Tommy observed shrewdly.
"She was always natty," Jane said, with a sad smile. "As much as she denied it and hated corsets, she liked to dress well and whenever she could she bought a dress" she recounted nostalgically. "Her boyfriend also gave her several dresses. Those are the ones she left here." As Jane said that last thing, Tommy noticed her tone of voice change to a more somber one.
"I gifted her a pearl Chanel dress and some patent leather shoes," Tommy confessed, unaware of what he was hinting at. His irrational masculine pride had pushed him to say something, whatever it was, that would put him above that Fairfax bastard.
"Did you get along with my daughter, Mr. Shelby?" That Jane would ask that question was to be expected.
Tommy witnessed the woman's gaze scrutinizing him and, intoxicated by Olivia's presence, he told himself that he couldn't continue to lie. He had loved her, loved her still, and would love her until his lungs released their last breath. Why hide from Olivia's mother how much he had loved her daughter?
"I wanted to marry her," he snapped, and Jane Westerling's eyes widened.
"What?" The woman was dumbfounded.
"Olivia and I loved each other," he explained with a twinge in his chest, a product of anguish. "I don't know if she ever told you about me but ..."
"Oh yes, I remember." Jane didn't let him finish speaking and put her hand to her lips, stifling surprise. "Ollie called me every week and a month after arriving in Birmingham, she told me that she had met a man". Tommy saw her shake her head, visibly shaken. "She mentioned it to me almost with fear, because she knew how much it had affected me to see her suffer for that idiot Andrew. I told her to be careful, to make sure that she was falling in love with a good man, and I asked her to please not to tell me anything else to save me trouble". Jane had started to cry. "I was selfish. I must have allowed her to tell me all about her new love."
"We were all selfish in one way or another." Thomas tried to comfort Jane by using words. With his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, he stroked the wedding ring.
"It's reassuring to know that before she left," Jane stifled a sob, "my Ollie met a man who truly loved her. If you are like Ada, Mr. Shelby, I have no doubt that you are a wonderful person".
Tommy felt a lump in his throat, and for a moment his heart seemed to stop beating. At what Jane had said, he refrained from nodding his head. He was not a wonderful person. The man who could have been a wonderful person had died the day he had set foot on French soil, with a shovel in one hand and rifle in the other. The mud and the blood had washed away any trace of humanity and the demons of the war had taken both Grace and Olivia. He couldn't imagine what Jane Westerling would say if she learned of his involvement in her daughter death.
"I'm not a wonderful person. Last week I killed an innocent man and yesterday I threatened another".
He watched as the woman braced herself and reached down to find something under Olivia's bed. To Tommy's surprise, she pulled out a box much like the one Ada had brought him to his study, and placed it on the bed. A cloud of dust blew off the bedspread as the weight of the box sank into the mattress.
"This box contains some of Olivia's diaries," Jane said. "I don't know if it is what you are looking for, but as far as I know, here she kept the diaries she wrote from the time she met Ada to before leaving for Birmingham. Your sister's notebooks may be here."
"Thank you." For a second, Tommy was about to confess what he was really looking for but he managed to stop in time.
"I'll leave you alone," the woman resolved suddenly. "I won't be able to bear the memories of my daughter, and besides, I think you deserve a moment of solitude".
When Jane left, Tommy opened the box almost desperately and the first thing he saw was a photograph. It didn't take long for him to recognize the couple in it: they were Olivia and Andrew Fairfax, by London Bridge. The photograph was dated 1925 and she recognized an engagement ring on Olivia's hand. She looked immensely happy and beautiful, as always, and Fairfax, who looked much more unkempt than the man who had met him the previous evening at the bar, looked listless.
Tommy put the photo aside and picked up a notebook at random. Opening it, he noted that it covered the months of May and June 1929. He repeated in his mind what Fairfax had related to him; how his relationship with Olivia had ended in the middle of that year and how he left the communist militancy when the fascist ranks began to acquire a worrying number of followers.
Tommy searched through the pages for an entry whose handwriting betrayed a broken heart, and found it.
June 3, 1929.
He did it. Andrew broke up with me one more time. He invited me to his house, we had dinner together, we had sex and he broke up with me. He acted the same way as four years ago and I was such an idiot that I didn't see it coming.
My heart hurts and I don't mean it figuratively. My chest really hurts, something twists inside me behind my ribs. It must be the controlled crying, the silence that I impose on myself so that my parents don't hear me cry. If Dad finds out that Andrew broke up with me again, he'll kill him.
Yes, I want Andrew dead, but I don't want my father to be the one to get his hands dirty and I think that no one on this planet deserves to lose freedom for such an jerk. Not even I, who have every right to take his life after he promised to take me to the altar twice, and twice he left me.
He was so cowardly, so miserable, that first he dragged me to his bed and then he told me that he intended to leave me. He says that he has met the daughter of a Lord, that he slept with her a couple of months ago without pretense of any kind and that he fell in love.
We reengaged in March and the wedding would be in July. My wedding dress is half finished and I am extremely embarrassed to tell the dressmaker that I don't need her to finish it. For a matter of pride -if I still have such a thing- I will pretend that nothing has happened and days before the date I will go to look for my dress, with the smile that I promised myself I would have when the happiest day of my life approached.
What made me believe that he would be able to change? Internally, I knew that such a thing was not possible. I forgave him the first time because the possibility of living a disappointment of that nature did not fit in my mind; It could not be happening to me. It was simple denial, a willful blindness, a lie that I told myself. And now I pay the price.
I wish I still had those damn papers with me that he once handed me and that compromised him in front of his comrades. They would have served at least to avenge me and frustrate his political desires, but I was so obedient and worried about him so much that I threw them into the fireplace.
I wonder what his comrades would say if they found out that Andrew Fairfax was selling information from the Communist Party to the fascists.
Andrew, for his part, was not an idiot. He knew that if he began to associate with fascism his political career would be cut short, so he enlisted in the Labour Party to climb faster. It is impressive that nobody within that party has done an investigation into the man that is Fairfax, but what were they going to find? If I, a thousand times stupid, burned any evidence capable of incriminating him.
Tommy couldn't continue reading. Suddenly, all the pieces began to fit together.
The previous evening, at the bar, Fairfax had pretended to be a foreign man to Oswald Mosley. He had toyed with the possibility that Olivia had been so foolish as to never put the truth he wanted to hide in writing, and if she had, what value were the words of a jilted woman? He had surely thought that Tommy, reading something that compromised him, would never believe Olivia, but God only knows how wrong he was.
It was to be expected that a piece of shit capable of taking advantage of such a noble girl and selling his own comrades would never think that on that Earth there could be someone who believed Olivia's words; that there was a person capable of loving her so much as not to question what she wrote.
Fairfax had underestimated him and Olivia. Tommy had an immense desire to shoot that bastard in the head but his mind made him remember what she had written in her diary: "no one on this planet deserves to lose freedom for such a jerk".
He found the small bottle of laudanum in the inside pocket of his jacket and took a long sip of the only elixir capable of quelling the impetuous need to kill Fairfax.
He had to get back to Birmingham before he did something crazy. He didn't know if Fairfax had laughed at him, raising the possibility that Olivia was alive, or remorse had driven him to be honest for the first time, but Tommy had already made that theory his own and wouldn't stop until he found enough evidence to lead him to Olivia, dead or alive.
If there was something true, it was that there were many details that did not make sense and of which he could not understand.
"Did you find what you were looking for, Mr. Shelby?" Jane's voice surprised him. Such was his rage that he had practically forgotten that he was still in the Westerling house. "My husband will be home from work in a few minutes and I have made tea. Would you like a cup?"
"You're very kind, Jane," said Tommy, his tongue numb. The opioid was starting to do its thing, "but it's about time I leave. I haven't been able to find my sister's notebooks. Would it be too much to ask if you would allow me to bring the box to Birmingham for Ada?"
He saw Jane frown upon hearing him. "I will return the box to you next week, when I have to go back to Parliament, and I will have tea with you and your husband."
"Only if you promise that Ada will come with you next week." Jane smiled a little. "I miss that little crazy one a lot. The last time I saw her was… " she stopped abruptly.
"At Olivia's funeral, a month and a half ago?" Tommy finished the sentence for her. He wondered if the strange reaction of the woman in front of him was a laudanum hallucination.
"Yes, exactly. At my daughter's funeral, "she nodded, folding her arms.
Tommy decided that he would pass up the opportunity to investigate because he was in no condition to bear any kind of revelation and the lack of mental clarity did not assure him that his brain was not exaggerating everything.
Tommy took the box and Jane walked him to the door. He said goodbye to the woman with all the kindness that he could pretend and while he was trying to remember where he had parked his car, he agreed with Arthur in his mind: he should read the last diary, perhaps there he would find the answer he was looking for . As soon as he set foot in Birmingham, that would be what he would do. Tommy would try not to involve Ada and Polly because if they were lying to him as he believed they were, they would go out of their way to perpetuate the lie by blocking his way back into the arms of his Olivia.