The Toymakers(50)

Kaspar fancied himself a driver of estimable talent, but driving the carts he and Emil had created up and down the empty Emporium aisles each summer had taught him only recklessness and haste. Cathy had to bark at him more than once, or grapple out with her arm to wrest him from the wheel, as he joined the flow of traffic heading east, along the river and out of the city.

Beyond London the roads lay empty and still. It was a revelation to see greenery again, that trees might sprout leaves in summer that were not curls of paper and corrugated card. Yet nothing was more revelatory than the smell that hit her as they came close to the sea. That smell, only salt, seaweed, perhaps even the barest hint of sewage, was intoxicating. She lifted Martha to breathe it in. Smells, she decided, were like the pine-bark ballerina hidden safely in her pocket. They could make you feel five, six, seven years old again.

Leigh had not changed in the months she had been away. The streets were the same, the shopfronts, the boats basking across the mudflats like beached wrecks. She directed Kaspar quietly, until at last they arrived at the street she had once lived. She had been gone mere months, had travelled only thirty miles, and yet a whole world existed between then and now.

‘Are you certain of this, Cathy?’

She lifted Martha, wrapped her up in a shawl. She had not cried once, in spite of Kaspar’s driving, but as Cathy stepped from the car she strained against her shoulder, putting up a protest.

Before Cathy could approach the first house, Kaspar called out: ‘Miss Wray, wait …’

Before he went after her, he reached into the back of the carriage and produced a lady’s leather purse, with ornamental clasps depicting butterflies in flight. In the middle of the road, beneath the brilliant reds of twilight, he presented it to Cathy.

‘It’s for you. I’ve seen mothers staggering up and down our Emporium aisles with such bulging bags, but not you, not with this …’

It was difficult to tear herself away from his eyes, but when she unclasped the purse and looked inside all she saw was blackness, rich and deep. She reached in but her fingers could not find the bottom.

There were all sorts of things that she wanted to say. She wanted to tell him thank you – for this purse, for bringing her so far away from his Emporium, for the way he had knelt at her side and told her she was strong, that she could do it all, as Martha came into the world – but, instead, she turned to face the old house and said, ‘You’ve never asked me who my baby’s father is.’

The statement seemed to catch Kaspar off guard. ‘It isn’t that I haven’t wanted to ask. But … you came to our Emporium with your secrets. They’re yours alone.’

‘No,’ she whispered. The fa?ade of the house seemed to glare down at her. ‘Not any more.’ She found the courage to face him again. ‘Kaspar, I owe you the truth. I’ve been a coward. But the truth is, I haven’t thought of Martha’s father in so long, it already seems another life. He was a friend to me, for a little while. Nothing more.’

Kaspar’s eyes twitched. ‘A little more, Miss Wray.’

‘I thought you’d stopped calling me that.’

‘Where is he now?’

Cathy barely knew. ‘Gone, off to some other family, some other future. He didn’t come looking, Kaspar. But I’ve already told you – it wasn’t as if it was … love.’

‘Not love,’ said Kaspar, ‘but there are … responsibilities.’

Cathy turned the word over. In the end, she supposed, Daniel’s responsibilities to his father had outweighed any responsibilities he had to a child who was barely an idea. But then there was Kaspar: a boy to whom ideas were everything.

She turned and walked some distance, crossing the street to reach her house in three loping strides. When she looked back, Kaspar was still staring after her.

‘Kaspar, about that day we were in London, when you took me to the park. I … wanted to. I want you to know that. And I might have, if only …’ How to say it without – not hurting his feelings, because sometimes Kaspar Godman behaved as if he had no feelings to be hurt. Perhaps it was only – without seeming foolish. In her heart, she had wanted to. But it was her body; her body had wanted different things. Things like rest, like food and water; like being able to sleep on a night without waking every second hour. People talked about the heart and the head being at war – but, when you were pregnant, the body was separate, and the body ruled all.

She lifted Martha to her shoulder, tightening the shawl around her. I’m not pregnant now, she thought – so what is it, what’s stopping me? Propriety? Could that really have been it? Because she had never once cared about being proper. She had spent the year, hadn’t she, in Papa Jack’s Emporium, instead of there, as her parents had planned …

She strode back toward him. It was captivating how silent he was. He did not flinch, even as she lifted a hand to stroke the hair out of his eyes, even as she rose on to her tiptoes (the baby sandwiched between them) and planted a kiss on the thin stubble that lined his cheek.

‘I knew you’d understand, Kaspar. If anyone could, it would be you.’

Then, cooing at Martha, she walked into her house.

It was cold out on the estuary. Kaspar took the motorcar down to the sand and watched the tide glittering as the stars revealed themselves, one by one. For a time, he walked along the shale, listening to the waves. A pair of old lovers sat out on the rocks, holding each other as they gazed into the gas lamps on the other side of the water. Kaspar sat higher yet, the darkness solidifying all around. Without knowing he was doing it, he twisted a length of sun-baked seaweed into the skeleton of a sailing boat and, giving that sailing boat wings, let it fly out into the blackness over the water. Those two old lovers, perhaps they had come here every night since they were children. Perhaps they would come here every night until, finally, one of them did not. And, as he watched, he got to thinking: what if they had been born two streets distant? What if they had not been sent to the same schools, or if their parents had not met in the same beer hall, or walked the same routes through the same parks? What if … she had not run away to his father’s Emporium, and he had not found her there? What if those boys had not crashed into his paper trees and she had not taken shelter, with him, in the Wendy House at the bottom of the aisle? What, then, of life?