The Toymakers(15)

He was about to impart all of this to the new girl – yet, when he looked around, she was still agape, exploring every recess of the Wendy House, running her fingers over every surface as if to make certain it was real.

‘What is this place?’

‘This, Miss Wray, is my papa’s pride and joy. He loves it so much he can’t bear to sell it, so we keep it just for show. Last Christmas, a man waltzed in here with a Gladstone bag stuffed full of pound notes, but Papa wouldn’t even come out of his workshop to see him. I had to send him away with a flea in his ear.’

‘But … how?’

It pained Kaspar to admit that he did not yet fully comprehend what his father had done to stretch out the space inside the playhouse. ‘Papa … does things. Emil or I, we’ll make a toy and along comes Papa and … he’s better, don’t you see? The things he does – why, there are toys, and then there are Papa Jack’s toys. And this Wendy House, well … I’ll get to the truth of the matter soon enough. Didn’t you ever have a lair when you were small? Somewhere secret only you knew about? A place in the bushes, or a corner of an attic, or …’

‘Well, yes,’ said Cathy, ‘but never like this.’

‘When Emil and I were just boys, we must have had a dozen different dens hidden around the shopfloor. They still show up from time to time, never where you’d think to look.’

‘We had a treehouse,’ Cathy remembered. ‘Lizzy – that’s my sister – used to sneak up cups and saucers and old china.’

‘Well, there you have it. And didn’t that treehouse seem huge when you were small? It might have been a castle itself when you were five years old. You probably thought it had an east and west wing, different antechambers, a gatehouse and a bailey and a curtain wall. Only, if you went back to it now, you’d find it tiny, just a few lengths of stick and a cramped little cubby. Do you see?’

Cathy really didn’t.

‘That’s the secret, I think. Papa won’t tell me because he says I’ll only really understand if I discover it myself, just like he did. But it’s got to be the perspectives. When you’re making toys, you’ve got to have the perspective of a child. Get that right and I would think you can do almost anything with space.’

Cathy had finished walking the circumference of the room and, for the first time, returned to the door where the paper tree sprawled.

‘We’ll just have to wait it out,’ said Kaspar, still hardly masking his glee. ‘They’ll dig us out soon. But …’ He paused, for there was a pained expression on Cathy’s face. She was cupping her belly with one hand and, with the other, bracing herself against the Wendy House wall. ‘New girl, what’s wrong?’

She opened her mouth to tell him it was nothing, but when no words came, Kaspar was already at her side. ‘New girl?’ He might have been shouting, but to Cathy the voice was as distant as the Emporium doors.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, but this time she did not resist as Kaspar put an arm around her and helped her into the armchair at the hearth.

It had been happening too often, these moments when even the dizziness grew so acute she could feel the Emporium spinning. Normally it was in the mornings, when she woke in the small hours and had to creep to the washroom. On those occasions the dizziness could be stifled with tea and dry toast, but more and more often it was coming in the middle of the day. Only yesterday, she had been resting in the stacks when Sally-Anne had wandered past and made some remark about her shirking. Secrets, it seemed, always wanted to be shared.

Kaspar had found water from somewhere. She put the mug to her lips and felt rejuvenated, if only for a second. It was only now, when she was at her weakest, that her thoughts flickered back to that little strip along the estuary sands and all the people she had left behind. And: is my mother still knotted with fear? she wondered. Is Lizzy worried for me, or does she secretly smile when our parents look the other way?

Now that the room had come back into focus, she could see that Kaspar was considering her like she was some puzzle he had to unpick, all his glee at the paper forest suddenly drained away.

‘It’s nothing,’ she promised. ‘I haven’t been eating properly, that’s all.’

Kaspar’s eyes dropped from her face to her belly, before drifting back up. There was no doubt what he was thinking, for Cathy had felt her body straining at her clothes too often in the past days. It was foolish not to have brought more. New life was not the sort of thing you could overlook for ever. The baby had been tumbling all day; she could feel it as a new kind of nausea rippling across her insides.

‘Cathy,’ he whispered, ‘how old are you?’

‘I’m nineteen,’ she said, tensing beneath his touch.

‘You’re sixteen if you’re a day.’

She held his stare. His eyes had pierced her, but she held it still.

‘You answered one of Papa’s adverts. That means you had to be running away from something. You can’t keep a secret in the Emporium, Cathy. Along these aisles, a secret’s never safe.’

It seemed important to go on looking into his eyes. They were not eyes you could get lost in; they were open and empty as the oceans, blue threaded with grey like the breakers of waves. The more she stared, the deeper that ocean seemed. And yet she went on staring.