The Toymakers(37)

Escaping from the Emporium seemed such a strange thing to hear Kaspar speaking about. She wondered how often he slipped through the tradesman’s exits, what life he found out here, what people he knew.

It was on her mind to ask when the river hove into view and, hanging above it, the Houses of Parliament, the Abbey standing proudly behind. She had seen them in miniature on the Emporium shelves, but there they were, blotting out the skyline. How vast the world really was, when you started looking up! Kaspar drove the coach out over the river and for a time they lingered there, the boats turning underneath. She breathed in the ripe tang of the Thames and wondered that she was even alive.

Sir Josiah’s sat beyond the railway arches and the Lambeth bridge. A tumbledown of brick buildings arrayed around a yard with wooden outhouses in between, it sat in shadow at the end of a row of buildings that looked bleaker still. The yard that sat in front was pitted with potholes where thistles and nettles burst up in inglorious rapture.

Kaspar brought the trap to a halt and, leaping down, extended a hand to guide down Cathy.

‘What is this place?’

In reply, the doors opened and, across the narrow yard, out tumbled a horde of children. The elder ones stampeded the younger in their clamour to get past. Two of the grubbiest fought each other for the privilege of unlocking the iron gates but, once they had, nothing (not even the barking of the mistress who had appeared in the doorway behind them) could hold back the tide. Children of all shapes and sizes, not one of them wearing clothes that fit, lapped around the wagon. Kaspar slid blinkers over his horse’s eyes, if only to stop his restless shifting.

‘Think of it as the Summer Emporium,’ Kaspar began – and, upon lifting the first of the felt sacks from the coach floor, submitted himself to a whirlwind of grasping hands as the children closed in.

After it was done, and the coach floor empty, Cathy watched the children tumble in orgies of delight around the yard, running wind-up armies against each other, squabbling for the affection of the litter of patchwork kittens they had awoken from their slumber, or clinging tight to the floating cloud castles for fear they might evaporate away. For some time, Kaspar was locked in conversation with Sir Josiah’s schoolmistress (why this should have bothered Cathy, she had no idea, save for the fact that this particular mistress had a prim beauty about her); only when he had finished did he saunter back through the gates and join her at the wagon. Inside the yard, the battles went on. One of the patchwork kittens was already stuck, mewing for help from the top of a paper tree.

‘Do you do this every year?’

‘Once a summer. It stops one feeling … stifled.’ He paused, reappraising himself. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Miss Wray! I’ll admit – I enjoy the adoration.’

‘I know you do.’

‘Does it make me awfully selfish?’

Cathy was puzzled. ‘To hand out toys at an abandoned children’s home?’

‘To bask in the glow of it.’

A thought cascaded over Cathy, one from which she could not escape. For mightn’t her own child, the one squirming in her belly, have started its life in a place like this? Might it not be its face pressed against the window, waiting for a visit – from the Emporium, from a grieving family, from an old spinster desperate for a baby of her own?

‘I think selfishness of that kind might be forgiven. Kaspar …’ And here she hesitated, thinking she might take his hand. ‘Can we …’

‘Back to the Emporium?’

‘Not that.’ She tried to lift herself on to the coach again, but her body resisted; she felt the touch of Kaspar’s hands as he helped her aboard. ‘But not here.’

‘I believe that’s a thing we might do, Miss Wray.’

Some time later, having first explored the flower markets of Covent Garden, Kaspar accompanied Cathy through the Marble Arch and walked her, arm in arm, into the budding green of Hyde Park. It was unseasonably bright and the sunshine had already lured countless clerks out of their offices. Most were picnicking around the Apsley Gate, where handsome columns framed a frieze of charioteers riding out to war. Cathy could not ignore the furrowed looks as they noted the roundness of her belly, but it was not this that made her follow Kaspar on. She was, after all, used to a little scorn. Soon, they reached a stand of trees grown in such contortions that they seemed crowned in roots, growing down into the earth. Here patients from the hospital on the Hyde Park Corner formed a great horseshoe, fresh London air being deemed beneficial to their health, and even one of these (an elderly lady clinging to a velveteen rabbit from the Emporium stores) acknowledged Kaspar as he passed.

‘They’re looking at me, aren’t they?’ Cathy asked. Together they found the shade above the Serpentine and looked out across its glittering expanse.

‘Let them look.’

‘They’ll think I’m the servant girl you’ve taken as your bride …’

‘Have they never seen a woman with child before?’

‘You said it yourself, Kaspar. I’m sixteen if I’m a day.’

‘You’ve never cared before.’

‘I don’t care now,’ she answered – though perhaps it was no longer true. The Wendy House had spoiled her. It would have been like this every day, had she stayed at home.

There came the sound of a motorcar approaching along the Rotten Row, a trail of horse-drawn carriages trotting in its wake. Kaspar turned away from them with a sigh. ‘I’d rather a runnerless rocking horse than a real horse almost any day.’