The Toymakers(77)

It was a sound that had never been heard in the Emporium. Cathy was wrestling to wrap up a herd of toy sheep when she heard her husband’s cry. Abandoning her post, she hurried into the aisles.

She found Kaspar where he had fallen, his hands over his face. Sirius was trying to nuzzle him but he didn’t seem to know the dog. Martha was standing over him, asking ‘Papa? Papa, are you there?’ as if she had not been asking the same thing every hour of every day since he returned. ‘What happened?’ Cathy asked. Customers were being drawn into the glade. They craned to take a look over the tops of the aisles.

Martha looked at her, face contorted as if that was answer enough.

‘Help me get him out of here,’ Cathy said, and, avoiding the thrashing of his limbs, tried to get her arms under his. ‘Martha?’

‘I’ll fetch Uncle Emil …’

She was already darting off when Cathy shouted, ‘No, don’t tell Emil!’ She did not know why, but somehow that seemed important. ‘Just … stop them all staring.’

With strength she did not know she had, Cathy lifted Kaspar to his feet and laboured him out of the depression. Though his arms had stopped thrashing, now he was a dead weight, slumped against her shoulder.

By the time she reached the aisle where model tigers prowled the uppermost shelves, Martha had done her job. The cloud castle drawbridge had opened above them and yet more lights were fountaining out, painting extravagant snowflakes in the air. This was distraction enough. Eyes no longer followed her as she dragged him along – and, in that faltering way, she brought him through the paper trees.

In the Wendy House, she laid him down. Sirius had followed. He whimpered miserably in the corner.

‘Kaspar?’

On the bed, he rolled, drawing his knees up to his chin. What a thin, angular body his was. At least he was in the room with her now. His eyes recognised her, but still those guttural noises came from the back of his throat.

Cathy made room at the bedside. No matter what he wanted, she would touch him now. She went to grip him by the shoulders but her fingers resisted. She had to battle herself to do it.

‘Kaspar. My love. What happened?’

He choked with laughter again. ‘It’s supposed to be a toy. How could a toy …’ But then the laughter was silence, and into the silence came his sobbing.

She tried to hold him closer, drawing him on to her knee, but there was strength in him yet. He rolled away, fists bunching up the bedclothes.

‘My love, you have to tell me. Tell me what I can do.’

This time, he looked at her. He opened his hands and said, ‘There is nothing.’

‘You did it for me. You held me here, on this same bed, and told me I could do it, told me I was strong. So tell me, why can’t I do it for you?’

‘My Cathy, you can’t—’

Her body was at odds with itself, just like his. Part of her wanted to throw herself down and lie beside him, but other parts could not bear to be there, her body repelling his just as his repelled her. Her disgust disgusted her, but that way lay madness; that way lay hate. Finally, she screamed, ‘Then you have to do it! I don’t care what it is. I don’t care how. But if you won’t let me, then there’s only you left. Do you understand? You didn’t die out there, Kaspar. You came back to us. Was it for a reason? Was it just plain luck? I don’t know. But if you didn’t die, you have to live … because there isn’t anything else.’

Kaspar’s breathing slowed. His eyes, which had darted into so many corners as she spoke, settled on hers.

‘She missed you, Kaspar. I …’ Her voice cracked. She was as bad as him. Since when had she lost the ability to say what she meant? ‘We waited for you all this time and you came back and …’

‘Then tell me. Tell me. How am I to—’

‘I don’t know,’ Cathy said, ‘but you do. I’ve watched you build boxes with caverns inside them. I took shelter in here with you, while paper trees rained down from the sky. You transform things out here, Kaspar. So why can’t you transform things … in there?’ After that, they stared at each other for the longest time. Soon, Cathy heard footsteps beyond the Wendy House walls. ‘She’s coming back. Kaspar, promise me. You’re alive, aren’t you? You are alive.’

That night, Emil took his time to disrobe. First, he picked every splinter of wood from his arms, where they had matted in the bristles of hair that grew thicker each year. Then he hung his work clothes carefully in the wardrobe, ready for another day’s labour. Only after dousing himself liberally in the little tin sink did he step behind the screen and don the nightclothes Mrs Hornung had left out for him. In the bedroom, Nina was already upright in bed, reading one of her novelettes.

Emil had taken his notebook to bed, as had been his practice ever since he was a boy, but the marks he made tonight were scrappy and inconsequential. He drew the face of a soldier, supposed to be as regal as the Imperial Kapitan, but instead the image looked bedraggled, worn, like a body whose soul had been spent. Like Kaspar, Emil caught himself thinking – and promptly scoured the image clean away. He had not yet told their father about the scene Kaspar had made in the glades of the Long War this evening; he wondered if he ever should.

‘Emil?’ Nina had been watching him all along. ‘Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?’