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It wasn't the first time Tommy had worn the beautiful lacy robe. All lovely, silky mauve satin, it was embellished with bands of delicate Genoese lace at the hem and cuffs, slick and cool against his milk-white skin.
It had hung at the very back of his closet for years now -- moving with him from Arrow House, back (temporarily) to Polly's old place, and now to Margate. Alongside it hung a few other items. There was a bugle-beaded frock, shimmery and lovely, and some other more workaday things: a simple house robe, a plain ecru silk slip. A small wooden box tucked away on a shelf held a few other items -- a pair of jeweled hair clips, a single filmy nylon, a near-empty atomizer of perfume, a pale-pink lipstick worn down to a nub.
It wasn't even the first time Tommy been caught wearing the robe. Arthur had burst in on him unexpectedly once, at Polly's old house, during Tommy's short residency there. After a brief moment of very uncomfortable silence -- Arthur blinking rapidly, Tommy frozen in place like an escaping prisoner caught in the beam of a searchlight -- he had rattled off an explanation: missed Grace terribly, had a dream last night, kept a few of her things, sometimes slipped the robe on when feeling especially blue, comforted him in his grief and made him feel closer to his beloved departed wife.
It wasn't the most convincing thing in the world, especially since it was broad daylight and Tommy wore nothing underneath.
But it felt a lot safer than telling the truth -- that it made him feel more like himself, not exactly a man, not exactly a woman but some undefined in-between thing, a shadowy and complicated middle ground. Sometimes he felt more like one, sometimes more like the other, sometimes a mix of both. He had indeed kept a few of Grace's things, partly to remember her by, but partly also because having them -- and being able to slip into them, surreptitiously, on certain days -- made him feel more comfortable in his own skin, more all of a piece.
That wasn't the sort of thing one went around talking about, even within the family. It was a quick way to be branded an invert, effete, almost an open invitation to be beaten to a pulp, or jailed, or both. And God knows Tommy risked being beaten to a pulp and jailed already, regularly and for legitimate business reasons; no good could come of adding another, more personal reason to the pile.
It was a lot easier than telling the truth as well, since he didn't have the words -- found it hard to articulate in a way that made much sense to anyone but himself. He'd been to the molly-houses, seen men living as women, gotten up in full women's kit, powdered and rouged. And while that, although more extreme and more dangerous, would have been far simpler to explain, it really didn't fit. He didn't particularly regret being a man, didn't especially wish he had been born otherwise -- reveled in it some days in fact. Loved the feeling of a well-tailored suit, a fresh shave, a pair of spit-shined brogans. But other days --
Well.
Ultimately, Tommy's hasty explanation had been enough to satisfy his not-very-inquisitive older brother. The fact that Arthur had seen the robe before, among Grace's things, helped. So did Arthur's own personal situation. He missed his own wife terribly, could relate at least to that aspect -- Linda was alive and well, but had washed her hands of him. He'd kept a few of her things as well -- a locket, a handkerchief, a monogrammed silver hairbrush.
Still, it had been a close thing, and an uncomfortable one. Arthur had finally, reluctantly accepted Tommy's involvement with men in general, and Alfie Solomons in particular. Arthur had been in the trenches too, was acquainted with foxhole liaisons and understood them, even if he hadn't chosen to participate. This, though, still felt like a bridge too far -- too dicey, too hard to explain, unlikely to be accepted.
Tommy had put the robe away for the time being. He had rubbed the delicate lace trim wistfully between his fingers one final time, then packed it into a steamer trunk along with the other items - out of sight, out of mind. And had promised himself -- a little sadly -- not to bring it out again.
***
And he didn't, not for a long time.
Not until years later, at Margate, when it felt relatively safe again. Margate was a quiet place -- no noisy, brawling pack of brothers and in-laws and nieces and nephews around, just himself and Alfie and Edna. And Cyril, of course, who was pleasantly nonjudgmental, perfectly happy as long as he got taken for walks and fed dinner scraps under the table.
Edna minded her own business. She often spent afternoons out at market or the tea shop, and the occasional evening away with her lady friends, playing mahjongg. And Alfie was remarkably easy to track. The heavy footfalls and thump of the ever-present cane announced his presence long before he actually came into view, as did the usual shouted hallo, treacle, I'm home.
Most of the time they did, anyway.
Tommy had turned the radio on -- the one that stood in the corner of the bedroom he shared with Alfie -- catching up on the latest BBC news reports. When the news gave way to the evening music programme, the volume rose somewhat. Tommy stood by the window, watching the sea through the sheer curtains, the silky robe wrapped around him, soft and cool on bare skin.
And nearly jumped a foot when the door creaked open behind him. Alfie lumbered in, head down, unbuttoning his waistcoat, collar already popped open and a fluff of dark blonde chest hair peeking out of the gap.
"Hallo, petal," he said, then lifted his chin, gray-green gaze warm, happy to be home. And stopped mid-stride, blinking, thick gold-ringed fingers still poised on the last waistcoat button. He looked Tommy up and down, plush lips pursed beneath his overgrown mustache.
Tommy froze -- a hand clutching the mauve satin robe, holding it closed at the base of his throat, Adam's apple bobbing sharply. Fuck.
What was there to say? "Where's your cane?" Tommy blurted, utterly uncertain what else to do or say, stomach dropping to his feet like a stone.
Alfie blinked. "Forgot it in the Crossley; Edna's gone out back to get it." He took a step towards Tommy, brow furrowed and reaching one big hand out.
Tommy did his best not to cringe. "Alfie -- "
Thick fingers settled on the mauve lace trim, brushing it lightly, then drifted down to Tommy's waist. "Lovely, treacle," Alfie rasped, then leaned in to plant a kiss on Tommy's temple --his customary greeting after a day out and about, still sweaty and disheveled. "Very soft. Not your color though, yeah? Blue would suit you better, I think." And he ambled off to the lavatory, to take a piss and wash up before dinner, as per usual -- humming along with the song on the radio under his breath.
Tommy stood quietly in the bedroom watching Alfie depart, robe still clutched tight around his throat and face flushed a hectic pink. And then went to the closet and put his normal kit back on for dinner, because what else was there to do?
****
Although the incident with the robe hadn't been nearly the disaster Tommy had worried it might be, it lingered in the back of his mind for days. Lurked, hovering in the parlor at night, like an elephant only Tommy could see, oppressive and sucking up all the air in the room.
Although Alfie hadn't asked for an explanation -- hadn't mentioned anything about it afterwards, at all -- Tommy felt certain it was just a matter of time. Tired of sitting on pins and needles, waiting for the other shoe to drop, he felt compelled to explain anyway.
"Alfie," he said one evening after dinner, clearing his throat. He approached the davenport in the parlor, where Alfie sat -- legs crossed, cup of tea in one hand and a Russian novel in the other. A racing form and a pencil lay in Alfie's lap; Cyril sprawled half-snoozing by his side.
"Hm?" Alfie asked, glancing up from his page briefly.
"About the other day -- " Tommy began, haltingly.
"What other day is that, petal?" Alfie asked, mumbling, attention already back on the novel in his hand.
Tommy took a deep breath, eyes averted, and began. He'd been steeling himself for this conversation for days now. "The day you came home, and I was upstairs, in the -- " He glanced down at Alfie and stopped, affronted. "You're not even paying attention."
"Course I am," murmured Alfie, who was in fact not paying attention, lost in his novel.
Tommy crossed his arms over his chest and stood directly in front of Alfie, juddering nerves morphing into annoyance. "You're reading," he pointed out, the pique evident in his voice.
"Thomas," Alfie began, eyes still on his book. "I'm fully capable of doing more than one -- " He glanced up, taking note of the icy blue death-stare being beamed in his direction, and sighed. "Fine. Observe, treacle. Abandoning all other fucking matters, right, no matter how important, so as I can give you my absolute full attention. Racing form? Gone," he said, brushing it off onto the floor. "The Brothers Karamazov -- fuckin' masterpiece, also gone. You've trumped Dostoevsky, petal, usurped the rightful place of a literary fuckin' genius, that should tell you something. Setting aside the tea, which I might add will undoubtedly get cold whilst awaiting your grand fucking pronouncement."
Cyril, curled up beside Alfie on the davenport, thumped his tail. These sorts of big gestures and animated talk often preceded a nice walk on the beach, or a long and lively game of go-get-the-stick. He looked up at Alfie hopefully, doggie brow wrinkled. "Cyril, mate, get down," Alfie told him. "Thomas has a very important announcement to make; I cannot afford, right, to be distracted by your presence." He patted Cyril's rump meaningfully; the mastiff got down with a disappointed grumble and padded off to the kitchen for a snack.
Having pointedly divested himself of anything Thomas might view as a distraction, Alfie leaned back against the cushions, chin raised and hands folded over his belly, blinking attentively at Tommy through his spectacles. "Go on, treacle. Spit it out. Say your thing; I'm on fucking tenterhooks," he rasped, with a bland expression that suggested he was not, in fact, on fucking tenterhooks.
Tommy blinked at him, nonplussed, the moment gone. "Christ, you're such a jackass sometimes, Alfie." He got up and stalked away towards the veranda to have a smoke.
"That's it?" Alfie asked, turning to look after him. "You're hardly the first one to make that observation; not exactly fuckin' news. Cyril, sorry mate, come back; false alarm."
******
The subject didn't arise again for a week. Thomas found himself fingering one of the jeweled hairpins while Alfie washed up after supper. He'd been thinking of it all day, had a hankering to slip it into his hair, but felt burdened by the weight of the conversation they hadn't yet had.
Alfie was an open-minded man, well aware of his own quirks and peculiarities, generally quick to overlook and accept them in others. But it didn't feel right to Tommy, to leave such a large thing -- large in his own mind, anyway, bearing as it did on his sense of who he was -- untouched. He and Alfie had begun, in a tentative way, to embark on a life together. To what degree they could, at least, with Alfie retired and in semi-hiding at Lethe House, and Tommy going back and forth between London and Margate.
He'd kept secrets before, from Grace and from his family and from Lizzie, and it had never ended well. And if he couldn't be himself with Alfie -- the former rival and retired ganglord who had, improbably, become first his friend and then his lover, and who had begun to feel more like home to Tommy than any other place or person -- well then, what was the fucking point of it all?
The two of them had gone out for a post-prandial stroll on the seashore, on a pleasant Sunday evening. Cyril tore up and down the sand, chasing grey plovers and dashing in and out of the shallows. Alfie had stopped to look out at a ship, far out in the deep water and silhouetted against the orange sunset sky. He stood facing the horizon, one big ringed hand shading his good eye, terminally cowlicked hair blown into spiky disarray by the evening breeze off the water.
It was a quiet evening -- hardly anyone else on the beach save a pair of young ladies frolicking in the surf, far out of earshot, their governess watching from the sand just above the tideline. Cyril was entertaining himself nicely, and there were no distractions aside from the cries of seabirds and the setting sun. It seemed like an ideal time, if there actually was such a thing.
"Alfie," Tommy began, coming up to stand beside the big Jew, elbows bumping. "We need to talk about something."
That caught Alfie's attention. "Fucking hell," he said. He took a half-step back to focus on Tommy with his good eye, brow furrowed. "That never means anything good."
Tommy sighed, exasperated, determined to salvage the conversation, corral it before it had a chance to go astray. "No," he said emphatically. "It's important, but it's not anything bad," he explained, hoping it did not in fact turn out to be anything bad. "It's about the other day, the....the dressing gown."
"Oh that, eh?" Alfie blinked. "That's all?" He blew out a breath, relieved. "So you kept a few things of Grace's, yeah? To remember her by? 's nothing. I've got some things of me mum's," he admitted, with a shrug. "I mean -- I don't put them on, yeah? Not that they'd fit even if I wanted to," he added, patting his belly, now comfortably padded thanks to retirement and lassitude and Edna's homemade zapekanka, of which he was just a little bit too fond. "But -- "
"No," Tommy interrupted emphatically, determined to keep the conversation on course and see it through. "It's not like that, Alfie, it's -- " He paused, looking vainly for the words he wanted.
"Alright, treacle -- go on, then," Alfie said finally, a bit wary again. "I'm listening."
Tommy went on to explain, haltingly, what was bothering him. How he'd always felt, since childhood -- feeling more like a boy some days, more like a girl others, on others still like some undefinable mix of the two. The way the mauve satin robe -- the one Alfie had found him wearing, and the hairpins, and the house dress -- felt right some days, the same way his sharply-tailored suits and flat caps felt right other days.
"I don't know what that makes me," he said soberly, hands in pockets, gazing straight ahead but not looking at anything in particular, other than pointedly not looking at Alfie. "Aside from just -- me. I'm just myself. I just -- am," he finished, a little lamely. It wasn't entirely what he meant, but he didn't have the words.
Alfie studied Tommy's profile for a long moment, one dark-blonde brow raised. He chuckled, disguising it with a harrumph. "Tommy Shelby, the great I AM," he intoned, looking out to sea again. "Very fuckin' biblical of you, petal," he added, with a bemused, sidewise glance at Thomas. "Always knew you had a bit of a God complex, yeah, nice to see you finally ownin' up to it." Cyril cantered up, a piece of driftwood in his mouth; Alfie bent and pried it away from him and chucked it into the surf.
Tommy clenched his jaw, frustrated. "Christ, Alfie. I'm serious, and this is important," he insisted. He hauled Alfie around by the lapels to face him. And tried again, explaining once more. "Some days I wake up feeling like a man, and some days I don't, and some days I do a little but not entirely. The day you found me upstairs, it was a day that I woke up feeling more like a --"
He stopped, seeing a smile twitch at the corner of Alfie's mouth, the faintest flicker at the end of the lush mustache that hid his upper lip. "What?" he asked, annoyed and a little distressed.
"Fuckin 'ell." Alfie chuckled, a low raspy sound -- probably the wrong thing to do, but since when had Alfie been averse to doing the wrong thing? Practically Margate's Resident Fucking Expert in saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment. "Tommy, sweetie -- " he began, an amused gleam in his good eye.
"Forget it." Tommy jammed a cigarette into his lip and started to stalk away down the sand, but was arrested by Alfie's grip on his elbow.
"Nah, mate, come back here. No fuckin' running away, not from me." Alfie tried to turn Tommy around; when Tommy stubbornly resisted he heaved a long-suffering sigh and circled him instead, standing in front of him.
"First of all, nasty fuckin' habit," he told Tommy, plucking the cigarette away and flinging it, unlit, into the surf. "Second -- " Tommy had turned away in disbelief to watch the cigarette's flight; Alfie gripped his chin and turned him back until their eyes met.
"Second," he began again, a little more emphatically. "You could wake up feeling like a fuckin' cucumber sandwich, right," he said, tipping Tommy's chin up with a finger, the other hand cupping his wiry shoulder. "And I would still want to fuck the living daylights out of you, yeah? Still listen to you snoring in my earhole every night, and consider myself lucky for it. Still .." He sniffed abruptly and turned to look out at the ocean, scratching at his beard. "Still make you soup, yeah? Always, because -- Well, I just fuckin' would, wouldn't I?"
Alfie -- who could talk a buzzard off a shitwagon, and flung treacles and sweeties and poppets around like birdseed -- was remarkably inept when it came to talking about tender feelings. Hesitant, almost shy, having grown up in a place where love came in the form of a sharp smack on the ear, an admonition to stand up straight, an extra half-slice of stale challah slipped almost grudgingly onto the edge of a plate.
Tommy was aware of Alfie's peculiar affliction, understood it, and got the message, plain as day. He smiled -- the small, genuine smile he rarely showed to anyone -- and stepped a little closer, one hand resting on Alfie's comfortably padded belly, the other reaching up to smooth a wayward, windblown strand of hair back into place. A small gesture, intimate enough to be a little risky in a public place, but the beach appeared empty at the moment, and safe enough. "Soup, always?" he said, voice low and warm, liking the way Alfie's mismatched eyes locked with his briefly, unusually round and guileless, before skating away again. "Well then."
"Let's go home, yeah?" Alfie requested quietly. "Cyril's about fuckin' worn himself out." He waved vaguely at the dog --
-- who was cantering around through the waves, splashing and chasing plovers and curlews and having a fine old time, clearly not the least bit worn out. "He's not -- " Tommy began.
"Tommy, ziskeit," Alfie explained patiently, voice low, gazing down meaningfully into Tommy's lovely blue eyes. "I would very much like to snog you right now, yeah? But I can't do that, or peel your fucking kit off and demonstrate to you what a delectable fucking cucumber sandwich you are, not out here in front of God and everyone, right? Fairly sure that sort of thing is frowned upon, even in fucking Margate."
Tommy smiled, raising a hand to push his own hair behind an ear, grazing Alfie's thigh along the way in a manner that looked purely accidental, but was not. "You're right," he agreed, without looking at Cyril. "He does look a little tired; maybe he's gotten too much sun. Come on," he told Alfie, who whistled for Cyril, and they headed back to Lethe House, shoulders brushing.
"Maybe I'll go into town tomorrow, yeah?" Alfie ventured as they walked across the sand, Cyril trotting along behind with his driftwood branch. "Buy you one of those nightdress things in blue, yeah? Purple's not really your color, looks too much like a bruise."
Tommy sighed, relieved, now that the elephant in the room had gone on its way. "It's not purple, it's mauve."
"Mauve, purple, what the fuck do I know?" Alfie shrugged. "Blue's better, is all." Coming abreast of Lethe House, they turned away from the sea, trudging uphill through the sand towards the veranda. "Think maybe I could schtupp you with it on sometime...?"
"Good God, Solomons, you are so fucking predictable," Tommy grumbled. But he smiled to himself, and looped his arm through Alfie's, leaning against his shoulder as they mounted the steps towards the veranda to head inside.